How to encode the filename parameter of Content-Disposition header in HTTP?

Web applications that want to force a resource to be downloaded rather than directly rendered in a Web browser issue a Content-Disposition header in the HTTP response of the form:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=FILENAME

The filename parameter can be used to suggest a name for the file into which the resource is downloaded by the browser. RFC 2183 (Content-Disposition), however, states in section 2.3 (The Filename Parameter) that the file name can only use US-ASCII characters:

> Current [RFC 2045] grammar restricts > parameter values (and hence > Content-Disposition filenames) to > US-ASCII. We recognize the great > desirability of allowing arbitrary > character sets in filenames, but it is > beyond the scope of this document to > define the necessary mechanisms.

There is empirical evidence, nevertheless, that most popular Web browsers today seem to permit non-US-ASCII characters yet (for the lack of a standard) disagree on the encoding scheme and character set specification of the file name. Question is then, what are the various schemes and encodings employed by the popular browsers if the file name “naïvefile” (without quotes and where the third letter is U+00EF) needed to be encoded into the Content-Disposition header?

For the purpose of this question, popular browsers being:

• Google Chrome
• Safari
• Internet Explorer or Edge
• Firefox
• Opera

I know this is an old post but it is still very relevant. I have found that modern browsers support rfc5987, which allows utf-8 encoding, percentage encoded (url-encoded). Then Naïve file.txt becomes:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename*=UTF-8''Na%C3%AFve%20file.txt

Safari (5) does not support this. Instead you should use the Safari standard of writing the file name directly in your utf-8 encoded header:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=Naïve file.txt

IE8 and older don't support it either and you need to use the IE standard of utf-8 encoding, percentage encoded:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=Na%C3%AFve%20file.txt

In ASP.Net I use the following code:

string contentDisposition;
if (Request.Browser.Browser == "IE" && (Request.Browser.Version == "7.0" || Request.Browser.Version == "8.0"))
    contentDisposition = "attachment; filename=" + Uri.EscapeDataString(fileName);
else if (Request.Browser.Browser == "Safari")
    contentDisposition = "attachment; filename=" + fileName;
else
    contentDisposition = "attachment; filename*=UTF-8''" + Uri.EscapeDataString(fileName);
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", contentDisposition);

I tested the above using IE7, IE8, IE9, Chrome 13, Opera 11, FF5, Safari 5.

Update November 2013:

Here is the code I currently use. I still have to support IE8, so I cannot get rid of the first part. It turns out that browsers on Android use the built in Android download manager and it cannot reliably parse file names in the standard way.

string contentDisposition;
if (Request.Browser.Browser == "IE" && (Request.Browser.Version == "7.0" || Request.Browser.Version == "8.0"))
    contentDisposition = "attachment; filename=" + Uri.EscapeDataString(fileName);
else if (Request.UserAgent != null && Request.UserAgent.ToLowerInvariant().Contains("android")) // android built-in download manager (all browsers on android)
    contentDisposition = "attachment; filename=\"" + MakeAndroidSafeFileName(fileName) + "\"";
else
    contentDisposition = "attachment; filename=\"" + fileName + "\"; filename*=UTF-8''" + Uri.EscapeDataString(fileName);
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", contentDisposition);

The above now tested in IE7-11, Chrome 32, Opera 12, FF25, Safari 6, using this filename for download: 你好abcABCæøåÆØÅäöüïëêîâéíáóúýñ½§!#¤%&()=`@£$€{[]}+´¨^~'-_,;.txt

On IE7 it works for some characters but not all. But who cares about IE7 nowadays?

This is the function I use to generate safe file names for Android. Note that I don't know which characters are supported on Android but that I have tested that these work for sure:

private static readonly Dictionary<char, char> AndroidAllowedChars = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ._-+,@£$€!½§~'=()[]{}0123456789".ToDictionary(c => c);
private string MakeAndroidSafeFileName(string fileName)
{
    char[] newFileName = fileName.ToCharArray();
    for (int i = 0; i < newFileName.Length; i++)
    {
        if (!AndroidAllowedChars.ContainsKey(newFileName[i]))
            newFileName[i] = '_';
    }
    return new string(newFileName);
}

@TomZ: I tested in IE7 and IE8 and it turned out that I did not need to escape apostrophe ('). Do you have an example where it fails?

@Dave Van den Eynde: Combining the two file names on one line as according to RFC6266 works except for Android and IE7+8 and I have updated the code to reflect this. Thank you for the suggestion.

@Thilo: No idea about GoodReader or any other non-browser. You might have some luck using the Android approach.

@Alex Zhukovskiy: I don't know why but as discussed on [Connect] it doesn't seem to work terribly well.

[Connect]: https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/820435/ie-11-does-not-support-decoding-the-filename-parameter-of-content-disposition-http-header-when-using-mime-encoded-word-syntax-generated-by-an-asp-net-handler "Connect"

• There is no interoperable way to encode non-ASCII names in Content-Disposition. Browser compatibility is a mess.

• The theoretically correct syntax for use of UTF-8 in Content-Disposition is very weird: filename*=UTF-8''foo%c3%a4 (yes, that's an asterisk, and no quotes except an empty single quote in the middle)

• This header is kinda-not-quite-standard (HTTP/1.1 spec acknowledges its existence, but doesn't require clients to support it).

There is a simple and very robust alternative: use a URL that contains the filename you want.

When the name after the last slash is the one you want, you don't need any extra headers!

This trick works:

/real_script.php/fake_filename.doc

And if your server supports URL rewriting (e.g. mod_rewrite in Apache) then you can fully hide the script part.

Characters in URLs should be in UTF-8, urlencoded byte-by-byte:

/mot%C3%B6rhead   # motörhead

There is discussion of this, including links to browser testing and backwards compatibility, in the proposed RFC 5987, "Character Set and Language Encoding for Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Header Field Parameters."

RFC 2183 indicates that such headers should be encoded according to RFC 2184, which was obsoleted by RFC 2231, covered by the draft RFC above.

RFC 6266 describes the “Use of the Content-Disposition Header Field in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)”. Quoting from that:

> 6. Internationalization Considerations > > The “filename*” parameter (Section 4.3), using the encoding defined > in [RFC5987], allows the server to transmit characters outside the > ISO-8859-1 character set, and also to optionally specify the language > in use.

And in their examples section:

> This example is the same as the one above, but adding the "filename" > parameter for compatibility with user agents not implementing > RFC 5987: > > Content-Disposition: attachment; > filename="EURO rates"; > filename*=utf-8''%e2%82%ac%20rates > > Note: Those user agents that do not support the RFC 5987 encoding > ignore “filename*” when it occurs after “filename”.

In Appendix D there is also a long list of suggestions to increase interoperability. It also points at a site which compares implementations. Current all-pass tests suitable for common file names include:

• attwithisofnplain: plain ISO-8859-1 file name with double quotes and without encoding. This requires a file name which is all ISO-8859-1 and does not contain percent signs, at least not in front of hex digits.
• attfnboth: two parameters in the order described above. Should work for most file names on most browsers, although IE8 will use the “filename” parameter.

That RFC 5987 in turn references RFC 2231, which describes the actual format. 2231 is primarily for mail, and 5987 tells us what parts may be used for HTTP headers as well. Don't confuse this with MIME headers used inside a multipart/form-data HTTP body, which is governed by RFC 2388 (section 4.4 in particular) and the HTML 5 draft.

The following document linked from the draft RFC mentioned by Jim in his answer further addresses the question and definitely worth a direct note here:

Test Cases for HTTP Content-Disposition header and RFC 2231/2047 Encoding

I use the following code snippets for encoding (assuming fileName contains the filename and extension of the file, i.e.: test.txt):

---

PHP:

if ( strpos ( $_SERVER [ 'HTTP_USER_AGENT' ], "MSIE" ) > 0 )
{
     header ( 'Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . rawurlencode ( $fileName ) . '"' );
}
else
{
     header( 'Content-Disposition: attachment; filename*=UTF-8\'\'' . rawurlencode ( $fileName ) );
}

Java:

fileName = request.getHeader ( "user-agent" ).contains ( "MSIE" ) ? URLEncoder.encode ( fileName, "utf-8") : MimeUtility.encodeWord ( fileName );
response.setHeader ( "Content-disposition", "attachment; filename=\"" + fileName + "\"");

Put the file name in double quotes. Solved the problem for me. Like this:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="My Report.doc"

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filenames_with_spaces_are_truncated_upon_download

I've tested multiple options. Browsers do not support the specs and act differently, I believe double quotes is the best option.

in asp.net mvc2 i use something like this:

return File(
    tempFile
    , "application/octet-stream"
    , HttpUtility.UrlPathEncode(fileName)
    );

I guess if you don't use mvc(2) you could just encode the filename using

HttpUtility.UrlPathEncode(fileName)

In ASP.NET Web API, I url encode the filename:

public static class HttpRequestMessageExtensions
{
    public static HttpResponseMessage CreateFileResponse(this HttpRequestMessage request, byte[] data, string filename, string mediaType)
    {
        HttpResponseMessage response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK);
        var stream = new MemoryStream(data);
        stream.Position = 0;

        response.Content = new StreamContent(stream);

        response.Content.Headers.ContentType = 
            new MediaTypeHeaderValue(mediaType);

        // URL-Encode filename
        // Fixes behavior in IE, that filenames with non US-ASCII characters
        // stay correct (not "_utf-8_.......=_=").
        var encodedFilename = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(filename, Encoding.UTF8);

        response.Content.Headers.ContentDisposition =
            new ContentDispositionHeaderValue("attachment") { FileName = encodedFilename };
        return response;
    }
}

In PHP this did it for me (assuming the filename is UTF8 encoded):

header('Content-Disposition: attachment;'
    . 'filename="' . addslashes(utf8_decode($filename)) . '";'
    . 'filename*=utf-8\'\'' . rawurlencode($filename));

Tested against IE8-11, Firefox and Chrome.
If the browser can interpret filename*=utf-8 it will use the UTF8 version of the filename, else it will use the decoded filename. If your filename contains characters that can't be represented in ISO-8859-1 you might want to consider using iconv instead.

If you are using a nodejs backend you can use the following code I found here

var fileName = 'my file(2).txt';
var header = "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename*=UTF-8''" 
             + encodeRFC5987ValueChars(fileName);

function encodeRFC5987ValueChars (str) {
    return encodeURIComponent(str).
        // Note that although RFC3986 reserves "!", RFC5987 does not,
        // so we do not need to escape it
        replace(/['()]/g, escape). // i.e., %27 %28 %29
        replace(/\*/g, '%2A').
            // The following are not required for percent-encoding per RFC5987, 
            // so we can allow for a little better readability over the wire: |`^
            replace(/%(?:7C|60|5E)/g, unescape);
}

I tested the following code in all major browsers, including older Explorers (via the compatibility mode), and it works well everywhere:

$filename = $_GET['file']; //this string from $_GET is already decoded
if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"MSIE"))
  $filename = rawurlencode($filename);
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$filename.'"');

I ended up with the following code in my "download.php" script (based on this blogpost and these test cases).

$il1_filename = utf8_decode($filename);
$to_underscore = "\"\\#*;:|<>/?";
$safe_filename = strtr($il1_filename, $to_underscore, str_repeat("_", strlen($to_underscore)));

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$safe_filename\""
.( $safe_filename === $filename ? "" : "; filename*=UTF-8''".rawurlencode($filename) ));

This uses the standard way of filename="..." as long as there are only iso-latin1 and "safe" characters used; if not, it adds the filename*=UTF-8'' url-encoded way. According to this specific test case, it should work from MSIE9 up, and on recent FF, Chrome, Safari; on lower MSIE version, it should offer filename containing the ISO8859-1 version of the filename, with underscores on characters not in this encoding.

Final note: the max. size for each header field is 8190 bytes on apache. UTF-8 can be up to four bytes per character; after rawurlencode, it is x3 = 12 bytes per one character. Pretty inefficient, but it should still be theoretically possible to have more than 600 "smiles" %F0%9F%98%81 in the filename.

Just an update since I was trying all this stuff today in response to a customer issue

• With the exception of Safari configured for Japanese, all browsers our customer tested worked best with filename=text.pdf - where text is a customer value serialized by ASP.Net/IIS in utf-8 without url encoding. For some reason, Safari configured for English would accept and properly save a file with utf-8 Japanese name but that same browser configured for Japanese would save the file with the utf-8 chars uninterpreted. All other browsers tested seemed to work best/fine (regardless of language configuration) with the filename utf-8 encoded without url encoding.
• I could not find a single browser implementing Rfc5987/8187 at all. I tested with the latest Chrome, Firefox builds plus IE 11 and Edge. I tried setting the header with just filename*=utf-8''texturlencoded.pdf, setting it with both filename=text.pdf; filename*=utf-8''texturlencoded.pdf. Not one feature of Rfc5987/8187 appeared to be getting processed correctly in any of the above.

From .NET 4.5 (and Core 1.0) you can use ContentDispositionHeaderValue to do the formatting for you.

var fileName = "Naïve file.txt";
var h = new System.Net.Http.Headers.ContentDispositionHeaderValue("attachment");
h.FileNameStar = fileName;
h.FileName = "fallback-ascii-name.txt";

Response.Headers.Add("Content-Disposition", h.ToString());

h.ToString() Will result in:

attachment; filename*=utf-8''Na%C3%AFve%20file.txt; filename=fallback-ascii-name.txt

PHP framework Symfony 4 has $filenameFallback in HeaderUtils::makeDisposition. You can look into this function for details - it is similar to the answers above.

Usage example:

$filenameFallback = preg_replace('#^.*\.#', md5($filename) . '.', $filename);
$disposition = $response->headers->makeDisposition(ResponseHeaderBag::DISPOSITION_ATTACHMENT, $filename, $filenameFallback);
$response->headers->set('Content-Disposition', $disposition);

Classic ASP Solution

Most modern browsers support passing the Filename as UTF-8 now but as was the case with a File Upload solution I use that was based on FreeASPUpload.Net (site no longer exists, link points to archive.org) it wouldn't work as the parsing of the binary relied on reading single byte ASCII encoded strings, which worked fine when you passed UTF-8 encoded data until you get to characters ASCII doesn't support.

However I was able to find a solution to get the code to read and parse the binary as UTF-8.

Public Function BytesToString(bytes)    'UTF-8..
  Dim bslen
  Dim i, k , N 
  Dim b , count 
  Dim str

  bslen = LenB(bytes)
  str=""

  i = 0
  Do While i < bslen
    b = AscB(MidB(bytes,i+1,1))

    If (b And &HFC) = &HFC Then
      count = 6
      N = b And &H1
    ElseIf (b And &HF8) = &HF8 Then
      count = 5
      N = b And &H3
    ElseIf (b And &HF0) = &HF0 Then
      count = 4
      N = b And &H7
    ElseIf (b And &HE0) = &HE0 Then
      count = 3
      N = b And &HF
    ElseIf (b And &HC0) = &HC0 Then
      count = 2
      N = b And &H1F
    Else
      count = 1
      str = str & Chr(b)
    End If

    If i + count - 1 > bslen Then
      str = str&"?"
      Exit Do
    End If

    If count>1 then
      For k = 1 To count - 1
        b = AscB(MidB(bytes,i+k+1,1))
        N = N * &H40 + (b And &H3F)
      Next
      str = str & ChrW(N)
    End If
    i = i + count
  Loop

  BytesToString = str
End Function

Credit goes to Pure ASP File Upload by implementing the BytesToString() function from include_aspuploader.asp in my own code I was able to get UTF-8 filenames working.

---

Useful Links

• Multipart/form-data and UTF-8 in a ASP Classic application

• Unicode, UTF, ASCII, ANSI format differences

For those who need a JavaScript way of encoding the header, I found that this function works well:

function createContentDispositionHeader(filename:string) {
	const encoded = encodeURIComponent(filename);
	return `attachment; filename*=UTF-8''${encoded}; filename="${encoded}"`;
}

This is based on what Nextcloud seems to be doing when downloading a file. The filename appears first as UTF-8 encoded, and possibly for compatibility with some browsers, the filename also appears without the UTF-8 prefix.

The method mimeHeaderEncode($string) from the library class Unicode does the job.

$file_name= Unicode::mimeHeaderEncode($file_name);

Example in drupal/php:

https://github.com/drupal/core-utility/blob/8.8.x/Unicode.php

/**
   * Encodes MIME/HTTP headers that contain incorrectly encoded characters.
   *
   * For example, Unicode::mimeHeaderEncode('tést.txt') returns
   * "=?UTF-8?B?dMOpc3QudHh0?=".
   *
   * See http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2047.txt for more information.
   *
   * Notes:
   * - Only encode strings that contain non-ASCII characters.
   * - We progressively cut-off a chunk with self::truncateBytes(). This ensures
   *   each chunk starts and ends on a character boundary.
   * - Using \n as the chunk separator may cause problems on some systems and
   *   may have to be changed to \r\n or \r.
   *
   * @param string $string
   *   The header to encode.
   * @param bool $shorten
   *   If TRUE, only return the first chunk of a multi-chunk encoded string.
   *
   * @return string
   *   The mime-encoded header.
   */
  public static function mimeHeaderEncode($string, $shorten = FALSE) {
    if (preg_match('/[^\x20-\x7E]/', $string)) {
      // floor((75 - strlen("=?UTF-8?B??=")) * 0.75);
      $chunk_size = 47;
      $len = strlen($string);
      $output = '';
      while ($len > 0) {
        $chunk = static::truncateBytes($string, $chunk_size);
        $output .= ' =?UTF-8?B?' . base64_encode($chunk) . "?=\n";
        if ($shorten) {
          break;
        }
        $c = strlen($chunk);
        $string = substr($string, $c);
        $len -= $c;
      }
      return trim($output);
    }
    return $string;
  }

We had a similar problem in a web application, and ended up by reading the filename from the HTML <input type="file">, and setting that in the url-encoded form in a new HTML <input type="hidden">. Of course we had to remove the path like "C:\fakepath" that is returned by some browsers.

Of course this does not directly answer OPs question, but may be a solution for others.

I normally URL-encode (with %xx) the filenames, and it seems to work in all browsers. You might want to do some tests anyway.