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A comment on Ask HN: Why are commas not allowed in urls?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why are commas not allowed in urls? by tronium on Friday May 30, 2014 @07:20PM (#7824611)
Thanks dave, that helped explain a little. However, I still have never actually seen a comma used as a parameter in a URL, do you have an example?
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Re:Ask HN: Why are commas not allowed in urls? by mcintyre1994 on Friday May 30, 2014 @07:58PM (#7824705)
The only case I can remember, and I'm not even sure why I remember is it was used as a delimiter in the Runescape forums. Just checked and it still seems to be, eg http://services.runescape.com/m=forum/forums.ws?185,186,980,...
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Re:Ask HN: Why are commas not allowed in urls? by daveslash on Monday June 02, 2014 @03:21PM (#7835485)
Sorry for the late response. I don't have an example, sorry.

Commas should not be used in URLs because they are so frequently used as delimiters in other scenarios. That's not to say that it can't work (so I'm sure there are some URLs with commas), but according to that RFC we shouldn't use them. Any URL with commas in it would be in violation of that spec. But hey, this is the web, we like to break specs all the time! ;-) It's my impression that this is more for sanity reasons than technical limitations.

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Re:Ask HN: Why are commas not allowed in urls? by randallma on Saturday May 31, 2014 @11:53PM (#7828110)
The Onion has their article urls in the format:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/scientific-community-baffle...

/articles/slug,id/

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Re:Ask HN: Why are commas not allowed in urls? by daveslash on Monday June 02, 2014 @03:23PM (#7835507)
Wow, thanks, I don't think I'd ever noticed a URL with a comma. I don't think it's a valid* URL, but apparently it's definitely do-able.

*valid == conforming to spec.

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