Importing images with special characters in path

Question

I am trying to import a lot of images. Images for each product are placed in subfolders by product IDs and locale.

The problem is that each locale specific folder name starts with a caret (^).

Example image paths:

9454032/^all/my_image.jpg
9454032/^en/my_english_image.jpg

What I'm getting

1. Wrong URL/path used for attribute image in row(s): 1, 2 
2. Wrong URL/path used for attribute small_image in row(s): 1, 2 
3. Wrong URL/path used for attribute thumbnail in row(s): 1, 2
4. Wrong URL/path used for attribute additional_images in row(s): 1, 2

What I've tried

• Encoding ^ to %5E, like in URLs
• Simply removing the caret from

What I'm sure of

• CSV file encoding; I'm using Sublime text, besides Mac's Numbers, to verify the data
• Image path is correct, because it works without the caret in the path
• Multiple images (in additional_images) are separated correctly, with |, and specified in the importer
• There are no other special characters in the image names
• No extra slash in the beginning of the image path

Possible solutions

• A shell script to rename all folders containing ^, although I'd like to avoid altering original data for consistency reasons

References

• https://sumankc.com/2016/07/28/wrong-urlpath-used-for-attribute-image-in-rows-magento2-product-import/

Versions

• Magento 2.3.5-p1
• PHP 7.3.24

Answer 1

There's no way around it. You have to sanitize the images URLs. I've written a python script to remove non-alphanumeric characters from the full path of each image.

Also, this version of Magento limits the image name to 90 characters by default. Some posts show a workaround for that.