Recently I moved to a new server after the old one had died. I had wordpress installation there, powered by Apache2 and Gentoo Linux. When moving, I decided to use nginx and Debian instead. I brought my wordpress back to work and everything would be fine if not for one little...
Problem
Images that contain special characters in the filenames don't load, I get 404 Not Found. For instance when requesting
http://my_site/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Zajęcia-dla-dorosłych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg
wordpress responds
You tried going to http://my_site/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Zaj%C4%99cia-dla-doros%C5%82ych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg, and it doesn't exist.
I played a while with the terminal and discovered that image filenames on the server differ a little bit from those requested by the wordpress. Despite they look identically, special character sequences are encoded in a different way. For example, when I copy filename Zajęcia-dla-dorosłych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg from terminal it is encoded as Zajęcia-dla-dorosłych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg. On the other hand, wordpress is looking for file Zajęcia-dla-dorosłych-z-bollywood-dance.jpg which doesn't exist, of course.
Both systems (the old Gentoo and the current Debian) are set to use UTF-8-based locale.
How to solve?
I think about three possible reasons:
- Debian stores special characters in filenames differently than Gentoo
- my new mysql stores special characters differently than the old one
- nginx handles special characters differently than Apache
Any suggestions how to falsificate those hypothesis and, finally, solve the problem?
