Question

This is an odd question, but only commensurate with the strange behavior I’m seeing. My app is Rails 3/Paperclip/S3.

Symptoms:

• All images are uploading regardless of their title.
• When uploading a .pdf or .doc, if the title has no spaces like my_doc.pdf, it uploads fine.
• When uploading a .pdf or .doc with spaces, such as My Doc.pdf, it fails, either with error broken pipe or by the file silently failing to upload to S3.
• When uploading a .pdf or .doc with numbers, such as mydoc20.pdf, it also fails as above.

I imagine there are two possible solutions to this problem.

1. Fix the broken pipe error directly (preferred method).
2. Automatically rename every uploaded file to remove spaces and numbers before it is saved to S3 – while not fixing it at the source, I imagine this would allay the issue.

I would greatly appreciate any help you can give me in fixing 1 and/or 2.

---

Code

# Upload.rb model
class Upload < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_attached_file :document,
    :storage => :s3,
    :s3_credentials => "#{::Rails.root.to_s}/config/s3.yml",
    :path => "/docs/:style/:id/:basename.:extension"
  has_attached_file :photo,
    :styles => {:medium => "200x300>", :thumb => "100x150>" },
    :storage => :s3,
    :s3_credentials => "#{::Rails.root.to_s}/config/s3.yml",
    :path => "/photos/:style/:id/:basename.:extension"

# s3.yml
development:
  bucket: dev_bucket_name
  access_key_id: dev_acc_key
  secret_access_key: dev_sec_key
production:
  bucket: my_production_bucket
  access_key_id: my_access_key_id
  secret_access_key: my_secret_key

# environment.rb is empty with regard to uploading.

# uploads_controller.rb
def edit
  @candidate = Candidate.find(current_user.user_type_id)
  render :layout => 'forms'
end

def update
  @candidate = Candidate.find(params[:id])
  if @candidate.update_attributes(params[:candidate])
    flash[:notice] = "Profile updated successfully."
    redirect_to :action => "show", :id => params[:id]
  else
    flash[:notice] = "There was an error updating your profile."
    render :action => "edit", :id => params[:id]
  end
end

I don’t believe there are any methods involved. I almost hope there is something obviously wrong with my approach because that means it’ll get fixed :).

Answer 1

For part two this should do it:

@s = "Really Important!*() Document version#123123.newest.pdf"
@s.gsub!(' ','_').downcase! #this will make everything lowercase and replace all spaces with underscores
@s.gsub!(/[^a-zA-Z._]+/,'') #this will remove all numbers and special characters except . and _
puts @s #prints "really_important_document_version.newest.pdf"

Edit: After some more research into paperclip I found the following: http://blog.wyeworks.com/2009/7/13/paperclip-file-rename

Check that link out, I believe it is what you are looking for.

Edit 2: In my initial read of your post I missed the part about pulling out numbers as well, I have modified the regulat expression code to account for that.