Introduction

HTTP does not define in what character-set urls are encoded. They are treated as binary strings. However, clients (as well as WebDAV clients) do make assumptions about how these are encoded.

An ideal world

In any ideal world, clients only use US-ASCII for paths. The displayName property should be used to present the client the filename, which, because it's part of an xml body can be any valid XML encoding.

Clients

Windows

Windows encodes files as ISO-8859-1 in request-urls. Starting SabreDAV 1.2.0alpha1 these will be automatically converted to their UTF-8 equivalents.

This only covers request-url's though, urls returned in PROPFIND bodies and the like will still be UTF-8. Some of these are reported to work, while others are not.

Read more on the Windows documentation page.

OS/X Finder

OS/X finder uses UTF-8. In most cases this works without any issues. More information can be found on the Finder page.

Other clients

More clients will be tested and added here.

Internally

All urls passed within SabreDAV are UTF-8 characters. Before 1.2.0alpha1 character sets were completely ignored, but now attempts are made to convert to UTF-8 where possible.

In general this is only done to urls, specifically when urls are converted to local paths and the reverse. This is all handled in Sabre_DAV_URLUtil.

Storage

If you are using a database or other datastore to store your data (and url's), you likely don't have to worry about this. Just make sure everything is UTF-8.

If you are using the filesystem to store files, this could be a little bit problematic. Linux and OS/X treat files as binary strings. When displayed in an application, the character encoding that will be used is based on the current locale. This is actually great, because there's no need to worry about these.

Windows is different though. NTFS uses UTF-16 internally to store filenames, but PHP's filesystem wrappers appear to use ISO-8859-1. This is problematic, because there's no clean mapping possible in many cases.

It might be useful in those cases to simply urlencode every filename before storing. This will give a cross-platform consistent result and the files will remain legible while checking it out with the console, etc.