White Space Management removing Double Spaces in file names

from RFC-1738: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt

The space character is unsafe because significant spaces may disappear and
insignificant spaces may be introduced when URLs are transcribed or
typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs.

...

All unsafe characters must always be encoded within a URL.

Disable whitespace is a bad idea and the simple one is a bad idea too.

I disagree about your statement that you cannot use unencoded spaces. <a href="/path / to /a file/some space file.jpg">Download</a> will work if it is in your HTML and if that path is correct. The browser will encode the spaces for you and it works on all modern browsers. While you SHOULD encode your file paths they are not always encoded and it is possible for them to work.

I still feel like the intelligent whitespace management should be more intelligent.

You can disable the Whitespace Management, or use the Simple one.

All URLs, in links or otherwise must be URL encoded. You can't use unencoded spaces in URLs and blame the systems or the specifications.

I agree that we should be not allow double or more spaces on our end. I do feel that the whitespace management may need to be smarter (when it is selected) and NOT do white space removal inside of the <a> and <img> tags. This would solve the problem for everyone using dynamic file names that the user controls during upload in CMS system or file management systems.

p.s. if you replace all the spaces with the plus sign when rendering the links then you probably don't need to do anything else, e.g.

as the plus symbol will be parsed as a space.

what you should do, though, is URLEncode() all your links.