Opening a file that has spaces in its name on the CLI does not work on Windows

[xusheng6]

binaryninja.exe C:\Users\xxxx\helloworld.exe works as expected, but binaryninja.exe C:\Users\xxxx\hello world.exe does not. Even if it is properly quoted like binaryninja.exe "C:\Users\xxxx\hello world.exe", it still does not work

[xusheng6]

The bug happens at https://github.com/Vector35/binaryninja/blob/791ab80e102227780821c9ffa07ffd80dd5c9fac/ui/main.cpp#L2640, where the path is just appended after "file:///" without proper handling, so when it contains a space it will break.

The code is specific to Windows because of the surrounding #ifdef. I am not exactly sure why the code is doing an #ifdef on the Windows path, AI suggest that the QUrl works fine for all three platforms

[plafosse]

IDK If this is valuable or not but here's and AI generated fix you can test out:

@@
-        QString urlStr;
-#ifdef Q_OS_WIN
-        urlStr = "file:///" + localPath;  // prepend verbatim; localPath may contain backslashes
-        if (!query.isEmpty())
-            urlStr += "?" + query;
-        // fragments ignored for files
-        QUrl fileUrl(urlStr, QUrl::StrictMode);
-#else
-        QUrl fileUrl = QUrl::fromLocalFile(localPath);
-        if (!query.isEmpty())
-            fileUrl.setQuery(query);
-#endif
+        QUrl fileUrl;
+#ifdef Q_OS_WIN
+        // StrictMode rejects raw spaces (and other characters) in the URL. Encode the canonical
+        // filesystem path so "hello world.exe" becomes "hello%20world.exe".
+        // Also preserves backslashes as %5C if localPath uses native separators.
+        const QString encodedPath =
+            QString::fromUtf8(QUrl::toPercentEncoding(localPath, QByteArray(":/")));
+
+        fileUrl = QUrl(QStringLiteral("file:///") + encodedPath, QUrl::StrictMode);
+        if (!fileUrl.isValid())
+        {
+            // Safety net: Qt helper is robust (UNC, odd edge cases).
+            fileUrl = QUrl::fromLocalFile(localPath);
+        }
+        if (!query.isEmpty())
+            fileUrl.setQuery(query);
+        // fragments ignored for files
+#else
+        fileUrl = QUrl::fromLocalFile(localPath);
+        if (!query.isEmpty())
+            fileUrl.setQuery(query);
+#endif