26 Oct Blog fixes; Solved ‘whitespace’ folders in WP-Uploads folder.
Category: Announcement

I solved problems with uploaded images in my previous posts today with a huge hand from Brian, who solved this rather peculiar problem very elegantly.

The issues were centered on the tendency of my old WordPress install putting files in a path like this;

blog.cocoia.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/month/%20%20/uploadedfile.jpg

Read on for the solution.

The obvious issue is that you can’t have folders called ‘ ‘ (in HTML, you ‘escape’ whitespace by replacing it with the symbol %20%20, like you can escape it in the C programming language with a backslash); you cannot ‘cd’ into these folders, or do anything else with them. I did manage to get them backed up, but after a WordPress upgrade to 2.3, everything was gone in the /uploads/ folder so I wanted to restore them. I couldn’t; no application seems to be able to do this.

Brian, who already makes the best FTP app out there (and the only one that could download whitespace folders, saving my ass) put together a regular expression that I could put into my Apache .htaccess file to replace any double whitespace in a requested file with a correct request. As you can see in the archives, it finally works. Thanks, Brian, and everyone who has been requesting posts older than a month (69% of blog visitors, I am looking at you), you are now free to go nuts and report problems with broken images or downloads.

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