Campaign Standard: SFTP File Transfer fails when space in folder path and wildcard in file pattern
In Adobe Campaign Standard, SFTP-based file transfer workflows can fail when the configured folder path contains spaces and the workflow uses a wildcard or dynamically generated file pattern. This behavior became more visible after platform upgrades that introduced a stricter cURL/libcurl version.
Description description
A workflow that uses a File Transfer activity may fail with errors similar to:
- CRL-290002 Download error in cURL
- URL using bad/illegal format or missing URL
This issue occurs under the following conditions:
- The workflow connects to an SFTP location.
- The configured folder path contains spaces.
- The workflow uses a wildcard pattern or a dynamic JavaScript-generated path to identify files.
In many cases, the same workflow works correctly when:
- the folder path does not contain spaces, or
- a full file name is provided instead of a wildcard pattern.
Resolution resolution
Cause
The root cause is that the initial SFTP directory-listing request was built without percent-encoding the directory portion of the URL. Older libcurl versions were more permissive and accepted spaces in the path, but newer versions reject such URLs as malformed.
As a result the initial request used to list matching files fails when the path contains spaces, while subsequent per-file requests may still work because those file paths are encoded correctly.
Workaround
Use one of the following workarounds until the product fix is available in the relevant release:
- Rename the folder so the path does not contain spaces.
- If renaming is not possible and server access is available, create a symbolic link or alias without spaces and point the workflow to that path.
- If the use case allows it, replace the wildcard pattern with an exact file name, since full file paths may continue to work even when wildcard-based listing fails.
Permanent Fix
Engineering implemented a product fix so that the directory portion of the initial SFTP listing URL is percent-encoded before the request is sent. This ensures paths containing spaces are converted correctly, for example by encoding spaces as %20, and aligns the behavior with newer libcurl validation rules.