Is there a complete list of the changes Shopify makes to uploaded file names?

Technical Q&A
1

I know that shopify makes changes to the file names of uploaded file, but I had never realized the full scope of the changes. Does anyone have a complete list of the changes / logic Shopify uses to modify the file names?

For context, we are currently setting up our new shopify store. We have been generating products through CSV uploads. We have been bulk uploading the product images into shopify before importing the products. I use a formula to convert the original file names as they are on our system, into valid image URLs for our shopify store. This has worked perfectly for nearly 3000 products so far, with just two hiccups this morning. Two of the products wouldn’t import because they had invalid image URLs.

Examining the URLs and searching our list of uploaded file revealed that the URL I had generated had a hyphen - just before the file extension, while the file in shopify did not. This resulted in deeper testing of the changes Shopify makes.

Here is what I have determined so far from testing;

  1. Hyphens at the beginning or end of a file name are completely removed.

  2. Spaces become underscores.

  3. Multiple spaces in a row are converted into a single underscore.

  4. Spaces at the beginning or end of the file name are completely removed.

  5. Periods are always left alone.

  6. All non-letter characters present on a standard QWERT keyboard, except for underscores, hyphens and periods, are treated like spaces. Multiple characters in a row become a single underscore. So this; 145 ($) % hi.TXT becomes this; 145_hi.TXT

  7. Accented latin characters are converted into their unaccented equivalent. Â = A, â = a, Ĥ = H

  8. SOME phonetic combined characters get separated. So Æ = AE, æ = ae. Others however are converted into a space. So ʣ = _ instead of dz, ʩ = _, instead of fn or fng

  9. Greek characters that line up with latin letters are converted to spaces. α = _ , β = _ , ε = _

I now realize that Shopify’s file name conversion is significantly more nuanced then I thought it was. I need to understand all the rules it follows when converting file names so that I can build an excel function to make the changes. Going forward, once we launch our new store we will be uploading new products monthly. The majority of the product images are named by our design team, who just copy the SKU and product title plus some extra comments. So the use of special characters is inevitable. Does anyone know where I can find a list of converted characters? I looked around but couldn’t find one.