Thanks for your answers (got back from a long trip to try things out). Definitely looks like the explode() command in the script is the culprit. Unfortunately
$files = explode("\t",$files);
doesn't work either. As an example I tried it on the following filename
"ESA PB-EO(2015)16 SAOCOM-CS – Status and Way forward v3 clean"
getting the result "File does not exist" with spaces replaced by plus signs i.e. "ESA+PB-EO/(2015/)16+....". Is there a workaround that you know off to get the filename in a consistent way for the encoding in PHP ?
Thanks again for your help
Mac