[arachne] Re: Spaces in URLs

["Glenn McCorkle" <glennmcc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Hi Matt,

Thank you very much for the heads-up.

I did some experimentation in Linux
and it turns-out that you are 100% correct.
(as you already knew) ;-)

Leading spaces in dirnames and filenames _are_ in-fact perfectly legal.

But try as I may, I could not make or rename any dirnames nor filenames
with trailing spaces.

The 'fix' has now been modified to simply remove any erroeous trailing
spaces which we might happen-across during our ventures through the web.

http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/badspace.htm
has also been updated to reflect this change.

If however you (or anyone else), points-out that trailing spaces are
in-fact also 'legal' ... the trailing space code will also be removed.

Thank again for showing me the error of my ways. :))

__________________________________________________________________________________

On Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:46:32 -0700 (PDT), Matt <mlewandowsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:

> Glenn,

> First and foremost, I appreciate your fix. Unfortunately, you got a bit
> overexuberant, I fear. :(

> As per RFC 2396, spaces MUST be escaped as %20 to be valid in a URI. Section
> 2.4.3 explains why. Your test page kinda demonstrates why, without realizing
> it... ;) RFC 2616 provides no further restrictions on spaces in URIs. The only
> mention of spaces in URIs in HTML attributes is in HTML 4.01, section 6.2, as
> was quoted to you by Joe. The stripping in that case is optional, but is
> common. Else <a href=" http://www.mysite.com/ "> would always break since
> you're unlikely to have a resource at "%20http://www.mysite.com/%20;. :) And,
> of course, if you ever strip whitespace, you should do it consistently, not
> just "before any http link" or some other weird rules.

> So, based on the information from the specs, *all* your fix should do is to
> remove leading and trailing whitespace from the attribute values. It should 
> not
> remove spaces embedded in URLs. It's perfectly valid to have a directory named
> " Files" and use an href like this, <link href="%20Files">, pointing to it.
> However, <link href=" Files"> MAY (standards-definition) link to "Files", per
> the HTML specs. (And probably will in practically any browser.) Of course, 
> it's
> perfectly valid to send someone off to " Files/" even though most browsers
> won't do that.

> So, as long as the white-space token to be removed is at the beginning or end
> of a CDATA value, there's nothing wrong with it (from the view of the 
> standards
> or common practice). However, stripping spaces from within URIs rather than
> escaping them isn't justifiable from any specs I'm familiar with.

> In any case, it seems that this fix should be done elsewhere in the code than
> the URL parser... But in the case of meta refresh, perhaps the URL parser is
> the correct place. (Since meta refresh is an odd exception to most rules... ;)

> Hope to have shed some light on this. And thanks for actually taking the time
> to fix the space issue. I recall first noticing it in 1.4 or so (actually,
> probably earlier, but I've no way to be sure anymore) and I've been manually
> fixing offending URLs since. :) So, over the next year, you may save me a full
> ten minutes. Multiply that by everyone who never had it dawn on them that not
> implementing a "MAY" in a spec may be taken as a bug, and there's some 
> manhours
> which will now be better spent! :)

> Now that I've gotten my piece in, I'll head to sleep. :)

> --Matt

> P.S. I've been inactive in the Arachne community for quite some time, but I've
> been happily following its developments regardless. The problems this
> particular "fix" may cause over time urged me to delurk momentarily. :) But
> feel free to poke me regarding edge cases like this. I've practically 
> memorized
> RFCs 2616 and 2396 as well as the HTML 4.01 spec. :)

> P.P.S. If anyone's counting, my last Arachne delurk was December 02, 2005...
>              Arachne at FreeLists
> -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --


-- 
 Glenn
 http://www.delorie.com/listserv/mime/
 http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/
 http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.table.html
                  Arachne at FreeLists                  
-- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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  • [arachne] Re: Spaces in URLs
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