Re: Percent encoding

On Thu, 25 Feb 2010 06:45:50 +0800, Silvia Pfeiffer  
<silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 11:56 PM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com>  
> wrote:
>> On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:19:47 +0800, Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Does anyone know what the canonical reference is for percent-decoding?
>>> Because we seem to assume it can be done late, but I just typed
>>> <http://www.youtube.com/watch%3fv=FwJduPtCvSM%26feature=rec-r2-2r-1-HM>  
>>> into
>>> my browser URL field, and the ? and & were decoded...
>>
>> You need to use a packet sniffing tool like wireshark to see what is
>> actually sent over the network. Browsers change the ways URLs are  
>> displayed
>> to make them look nicer. Servers can of course do whatever strange  
>> things
>> they want with the URL, but does the above link actually work? (I'm in
>> China, where YouTube does not exist.)
>
> Yeah, totally works and is displayed in exactly that way in the
> browser bar in Firefox 3.7a.

Perhaps YouTube decodes first and splits last, or perhaps they just use a  
regexp to find v=XXXXX anywhere. Whatever is the case with YouTube, I  
assume we want to match as closely as possible how query strings works in  
e.g. ASP, PHP, JSP and Perl CGI, or there is no benefit in using something  
that resembles query strings.

We can never be 100% compatible, for reasons listed in a note after  
http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Fragments/WD-media-fragments-spec/#decode-a-percent-encoded-string

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software