Auto clean media file names to be URL friendly

Except by English, almost all languages use accents regularly.

When you upload a media to WordPress, it doesn’t treat the file name to be URL friendly, so it comes with spaces, special characters and everything in between.

This results in broken links all the time… If you do a zip backup of your website and upload it again in another server, I GUARANTEE you wil have ALL your files with special characters broken. (Ok, I don’t guarantee, but it’s very common to happen)

My proposal here is to at least add a checkbox to Settings -> Media (options-media.php) to enable “Clean file names to be URL friendly” or something like that, stripping it from accents and turning spaces into hyphens.

Because good luck explaining my clients they should replace space with hyphens and strip all accents of the filenames… xD

But seriously though, usually who manages the content isn’t a programmer. It’s 50 years old Susan, or the intern that changes every week and keeps the website updated for 60 years old Barry, etc.

Search for something like “broken image special character wordpress” and you’ll see this is a pretty common issue.

If the problem is that I should sanitize the name before uploading, why not do it automatically, to avoid problems with user-entered data? WordPress is used by millions of small business, and it’s guaranteed that if you have special characters in your media files, you will have problem migrating this website to another server.

I use Clean Image Filenames frequently, it’s a MUST for non-english speakers. I created this topic for believing this should be a built-in functionality, and not a plugin.

If we could replace:

• Spaces with hypens
• à/á/?/a with a
• è/é/ê with e
• ì/í/? with i
• ò/ó/? with o
• ù/ú/? with u

It would solve 95% of the issues already.