If a user enters an odd filename, the instructor can't retrieve it. UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character

[e271]

If a student use some strange character in the filename, the instructor can't retrieve the file. Probably there should be some sort of limitations on the characters of the filenames, maybe change the characters them to avoid such issues.

Last part of the log:

File "/edx/app/edxapp/venvs/edxapp/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/webob/descriptors.py", line 142, in fset
value = value.encode('latin-1')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 45: ordinal not in range(256)

[MalkavianBilbao]

I have same problem and made some tests from Windows, Linux, MacOS and an Iphone. The problem only occurs when all this conditions are fulfilled when uploading:

1- The file have some symbol existent in spanish (and probably other languages) but not in english (áéíóúñ€ ...).
2- The file is uploaded from a computer with MacOS.
3- The browser is NOT Safari (Firefox, Google Chrome...).

Uploading files to OpenEdx (instead to edx-sga) result in files renamed to avoid these problems, so maybe the code from OpenEdx file uploading form could be used.

People talk here about a related problem and a solution in PHP:
https://wpfilebase.com/forums/topic/filename-encoding-problem-based-on-os-and-browser-combination/
(And here years ago, with reference to more related bugs. Comments here could give maybe more info: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=968142 )