Working with UTF-characters in bash - linux

Question

I am trying to create a script that walks a directory and renames files. I would like to be able to extract the filename and file extension separately, but if the file path contains either spaces or Swedish UTF8-characters such as ÅÄÖ, it breakes.
I've found the below shown snippet to extract the filename + extension here on SO, but as I am seeing that it works on paths with no UTF-chars or whitespace, I am thinking that I am not properly escaping my variables.
Perhaps I am doing something wrong. Any ideas on what I can do to make this work with paths with UTF8 chars and whitespace?
for file in $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS; do
FULLPATH="$file"
FILENAME=${FULLPATH##*/}
FILEEXTENSION=${FILENAME##*.}
BASEDIRECTORY=${FULLPATH%$FILENAME}
#Log the vars for debugging
echo "$FULLPATH" >> ~/Desktop/log.txt
echo "$FILENAME" >> ~/Desktop/log.txt
echo "$FILEEXTENSION" >> ~/Desktop/log.txt
echo "$BASEDIRECTORY" >> ~/Desktop/log.txt
done

Answer 1

The problem is that the NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATH variable is new-line escaped per item.
You need to use:
while read file; do
FULLPATH="$file"
FILENAME=${FULLPATH##*/}
FILEEXTENSION=${FILENAME##*.}
BASEDIRECTORY=${FULLPATH%$FILENAME}
#Log the vars for debugging
echo "$FULLPATH" >> ~/Desktop/log.txt
echo "$FILENAME" >> ~/Desktop/log.txt
echo "$FILEEXTENSION" >> ~/Desktop/log.txt
echo "$BASEDIRECTORY" >> ~/Desktop/log.txt
done <<<"$NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS"

Answer 2

I have this in my dotfiles:
# Prefer US English and use UTF-8
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
export LANG="en_US"
With that configuration, it seems to work:
$ ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 Mathias staff 68 Jan 17 11:32 test space test
drwxr-xr-x 2 Mathias staff 68 Jan 17 11:29 test©test
$ for file in *; do echo "$file"; done
test space test
test©test