Replace special characters in Vendor Payments and Reimbursement Request plugins automagically

[andreamiddleton]

The character set that our bank will accept in an upload file for wires or ACH transfers is quite limited. When we upload a file with any payment instructions that contain so-called "special characters," the bank rejects the payment and the process to fix the payment instructions is quite clunky*.

It would save a large amount of administrative time if, when the Vendor Payment or Reimbursement Request post was saved, the "special characters" would be converted to characters that the bank will accept.

The character set supported is:
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
/ - ? : ( ) . , ' + and SPACE

It would also be good to include a little notice at the top of any "post" that had special characters stripped out of it, saying "Hi! "Special characters" have been replaced in the payment instructions so that the bank will process the payment." That way we won't have organizers wondering what happened to their umlauts. :)

*That process is (for the morbidly curious): open payment request in the WordCamp site, find the special characters, change them, save again, go back to the network admin, download the payment file again, cross fingers, and upload the file again to Chase.

[coreymckrill]

This ticket is very similar to #2938, although the prescribed solution is different. The problem with converting special characters to simple ASCII ones that the bank will accept is that if we're talking about other alphabets like Thai or Cyrillic, there aren't any close equivalents in ASCII to use.

I'm open to other solutions, but let's close this and consolidate the discussion into #2938.

[iandunn]

I think it'd be good to have a separate ticket for this, since it seems like it involves different CPTs and different external systems. So, the commit that fixes #2938 won't fix the problem here.

[coreymckrill]

Copied this issue to GitHub: ​https://github.com/WordPress/wordcamp.org/issues/403