My url isn't your url

Re:My url isn't your url by merb on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @03:15PM (#11678327)

    (and yeah, file: URLs most have three but lets ignore that for now)

I don't want to be nitpicky but actually a file url still has two slashes, the third slash is actually the root path i.e.: file:///home where the two slashes are slash-slash-colon and there third is actually the start of the path. (actually it just emit's the host)

Actually there is one exception, but just ignore this widly 'unused' operating system which doesn't seem to care about posix and rfc's anyway.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:My url isn't your url by phluid61 on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:54AM (#11682369)

Actually, no. From RFC 1738, Section 3.10:

   A file URL takes the form:
   
       file://<host>/<path>
   
   where <host> is the fully qualified domain name of the system on
   which the <path> is accessible, and <path> is a hierarchical
   directory path of the form <directory>/<directory>/.../<name>.

And then in Section 5 (the BNF):

   ... elements may be preceded
   with <n>* to designate n or more repetitions of the following
   element; n defaults to 0.
   
   fileurl        = "file://" [ host | "localhost" ] "/" fpath
   
   fpath          = fsegment *[ "/" fsegment ]
   fsegment       = *[ uchar | "?" | ":" | "@" | "&" | "=" ]

So that first slash isn't part of the path, and the path starts with a directory name. The fact that the root directory in a UNIXy environment doesn't have a name (or has a zero-length name) is a source of much confusion. (Nobody would accept "file:////etc/passwd" as a URL, but that's how I read the spec.)

This is also why Firefox insists that there are five consecutive slashes when encoding a UNC string (a Windows/Samba share path, like "\\server\share\path\to\file.txt") into a URL (e.g.: "file://///server/share/path/to/file.txt")

And let us not even begin on the fact that file: URLs are specified in an "obsolete" spec, and explicitly allow characters in the path that are disallowed by RFC 3986. I'm working on fixing that [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-file-scheme] but it takes time.

[ Parent | on HN ]