QDesktopServices::openUrl() fails if path contains spaces (after "apt-get upgrade") - c++

Question

I recently saw this error on programs which used to work fine. I think that the error started appearing after I did a sudo apt-get upgrade, which might have upgraded the Qt libraries on my machine.
I've reproduced this error for newly created project containing this code:
QDesktopServices::openUrl(QUrl("/home/sashoalm/Has Spaces.txt"));
QDesktopServices::openUrl(QUrl::fromLocalFile("/home/sashoalm/Has Spaces.txt"));
This produces 2 message boxes saying the same - /home/sashoalm/Has%20Spaces.txt: No such file or directory. But the file exists - I've verified that, xdg-open "/home/sashoalm/Has Spaces.txt" works fine, for example.
Any workarounds? When did this bug happen? My OS is Debian Wheezy.
Edit: I checked Qt4's source code, and the relevant code is this (from qdesktopservices_x11.cpp):
return (QProcess::startDetached(client + QLatin1Char(' ') + QString::fromLatin1(url.toEncoded().constData())));
QUrl::toEncoded() returns the percent-encoded path as file:///home/sashoalm/Has%20Spaces.txt. What is strange is that there were no changes in that file save updating the copyright notices since at before 2011. So it can't be a change in Qt. But the command issued by QDesktopServices::openUrl() is xdg-open file:///home/sashoalm/Has%20Spaces.txt, and that doesn't work on my computer. Perhaps it used to work before, and an update to xdg-open itself broke it? Does anyone know if xdg-open should handle file:/// with percent encoding?

Answer 1

on Qt5
QDesktopServices::openUrl(QUrl::fromLocalFile("/home/sashoalm/Has Spaces.txt"));
worked just fine. I was having the same problem when loading the file purely from a QUrl like the first line
QDesktopServices::openUrl(QUrl("/home/sashoalm/Has Spaces.txt"));
but when used the QUrl::fromLocalFile it just did the thing

Answer 2

Either escape the space with \
QUrl("/home/sashoalm/Has\ Spaces.txt")
or add quotes to the path: -
QUrl("\"/home/sashoalm/Has Spaces\"")