How are article and image (file attachments) title names actually being handled?

**Thorius** · October 16, 2012

Hello,

I have checked the online manual here and can find no reference as to exactly which characters are allowed and displayed, versus allowed but ignored or treated as wildcards.

Example:
Article name is Ol' Man River and we want to add an image (to be referenced via a template using the pagename) called Ol' Man River.png.

We create the article and add some text and the template reference to pull the image. Then we go to upload the image, but the default TITLE name gets changed to Ol_Man_River_png. Now, we can correct this TITLE to read Ol' Man River.png before posting the image. But, even if we do not, it seems that several different image file titles and file names could be picked up and work correctly...

TITLES: Ol Man River.png Ol' Man River.png Ol Man River png
Files: Ol' Man River.png Ol Man River.png

Is there an option somewhere to disable all this ambiguous behavior and have the file names and article titles act in a more strict manor? Specifically, it would be great if we knew how to set VaultWiki to correctly and distinctly handle the characters: ! , . ' ? " ( ) - + & inside of article and file names, like other Wikis do.

Thanks

**pegasus** · October 16, 2012

Special characters and spaces are removed from URLs and replaced with the _ character when the title is URL-encoded. If the title isn't created yet, it becomes impossible to un-encode the title to retrieve the correct special characters again. The only way is to create the article, and enter the intended title into the editor. Once it's created, there should not be ambiguity from page load to page load. There is no way to enable a "strict" mode that would allow all such characters. Periods (.) cause problems on some servers, ? is a reserved URL character, as is +.

However, if you enter a replacement scheme like ! => ! in the Wiki's URL Replacement Manager, you may be able to allow many other characters that are normally stripped.

**Thorius** · October 16, 2012

Thank you!

Originally Posted by pegasus

There is no way to enable a "strict" mode that would allow all such characters. Periods (.) cause problems on some servers, ? is a reserved URL character, as is +.

However, if you enter a replacement scheme like ! => ! in the Wiki's URL Replacement Manager, you may be able to allow many other characters that are normally stripped.

So the replacement rules will take precedence over any built in rules, when forming both the initial URL and title?

Sounds good.

**Thorius** · October 16, 2012

So, if I wish to preserve the ' character (right now it is simply absorbed by the VaultWiki, not converted into an underscore or space), would I replace the ' with another ', or replace the ' with %27, in the Wiki URL Management panel?

Thanks

**pegasus** · October 17, 2012

My understanding of the system is that if you replace a character with itself, it should preserve the character, whether it is absorbed or replaced by a space. You should avoid URL characters +#%& in URLs (even as part of replacement text). In my experience they cause intermittent errors locating the desired page. After changing your replacement rules, make sure you click Rebuild All URLs, to update the paths to existing pages that might be affected by your rules.