WARNING: Please note that this article was published a long time ago. The information contained might be outdated.
Working with AWS S3 and CloudFront I found that they interpret URLs a bit differently.
To test this I've setup an S3 bucket with the Static Website Hosting configuration set to Enable website hosting. I've uploaded two files in the bucket, one named test+file.html, the other named test_file.html:
- https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/special-chars-test/test%2Bfile.html
- https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/special-chars-test/test_file.html
Notice the URL of the first file: the + sign has been replaced with %2B.
If we try to open https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/special-chars-test/test+file.html S3 will complain, returning an Access Denied message.
But, if we activate CloudFront things are different. Both the following URLs work: