Question

Working with CakePHP and Java Web Start I’m generating the necessary .jnlp-file within a controller in which among other things I set the filename as a header-field. That works fine as long I’m not trying to use special chars in the filenames. However, I’d like to enable every character that is possible on the main operating systems as a filename. So what I try to do is removing all the invalid characters by replacing them through empty strings. But there seems to be a problem with whitespaces which should be allowed in filenames.

That’s the code:

$panel_id = 1
$panelname = 'w h i t e s p a c e s';
$filename = sprintf('"Project_%d_%s.jnlp"', $panel_id, $panelname);
$invalid_chars = array('<', '>', '?', '"', ':', '|', '\\', '/', '*', '&');
$filename = str_replace($invalid_filenamechars, '', $filename);
$this->header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . $filename);

When I do that, the resulting filename in the header is ‘Project_1_w h i t e s p a c e’, while Windows 7 wants to save the file as ‘Project_1_w’. So it seems that my OS doesn’t accept unescaped whitespaces in filenames? I would be happy with that explanation if it wasn’t for the following: I left the lines 4 and 5, so that the code looks

$panel_id = 1
$panelname = 'w h i t e s p a c e s';
$filename = sprintf('"Project_%d_%s.jnlp"', $panel_id, $panelname);
$this->header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . $filename);

And now Windows is willing to save the file with all its whitespaces, still I cannot understand why. If I look at the filenames in the headers by using wireshark, both are the same. And if the sprintf-line is replaced by $filename = 'w h i t e s p a c e' or even $filename = $panelname it cuts the filename as in the first codesnippet. But I can replace the sprintf with the dottet-string-concat syntax and it works.

Can anyone tell me, what I’m overlooking?

Answer 1

The difference is the double quotes. With the first code you’ll end up with:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=Project_1_w h i t e s p a c e s.jnlp

with the second code you’ll end up with:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Project_1_w h i t e s p a c e s.jnlp"

What you probably want is something like:

$panel_id = 1;
$panelname = 'w h i t e s p a c e s';
$filename = sprintf('"Project_%d_%s.jnlp"', $panel_id, $panelname);
$invalid_chars = array('<', '>', '?', '"', ':', '|', '\\', '/', '*', '&');
$filename = str_replace($invalid_filenamechars, '', $filename);
$this->header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$filename.'"');

This strips any double quotes within $filename, but then makes sure that $filename is always surrounded by double quotes.