Question

I have a very simple file upload that allows users to upload PDF files. On another page I then reference those files through an anchor tag. However, it seems that when a user upload a file that contains the pound sign (#) it breaks the anchor tag. It doesn’t cause any type of Coldfusion error, it just can’t find the file. If I remove the #, it works just fine. I am sure there are a number of other characters that would have this same issue.

I’ve tried putting URLEncodedFormat() around the file name inside the anchor but that doesn’t help. The only other thing I could think of was to rename the file each time it was uploaded and remove the “#” character (and any other “bad” character).

There has got to be an easier solution. Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you control the file upload code try validating the string with

 IsValid("url",usersFileName) or
 IsValid("regex",usersFileName,"[a-zA-Z0-9]")

Otherwise if you are comfortable with regex I would suggest something like the previous posters are commenting on

  REReplace(usersfilename,"[^a-zA-Z0-9]","","ALL")

These samples assume you will add the “.pdf” and only allows letters and numbers. If you need underscores or the period it would look like this…

  REReplace(usersfilename,"[^a-zA-Z0-9\._]","","ALL")

I am not a regex guru, if I have one of these wrong I am sure several will jump in and correct me 🙂