Re: Semantic meaning of double quotation marks delimiting quoted-string

On 28 Oct 2007, at 18:32, Julian Reschke wrote:

> Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
>> Hi,
>> Earlier today I posted <http://gsnedders.com/http-entity-tags- 
>> confusion>, and having discussed it with various people, have  
>> concluded that it'd be best addressed by RFC 2616bis.
>> In short, the post raises the issue of the meaning of double  
>> quotes. If you parse them out, you end up with Etag: W/"a" and  
>> Etag: "W/a" equivalent. If you don't, you can end up with  
>> character sets such as "UTF-8" (i.e., including the quotation  
>> marks) in headers like Content-Type: text/plain;charset="UTF-8".  
>> What is the expected behaviour for quoted-string (or, if need be,  
>> for each and every specification that uses quoted-string)?
>> ...
>
> The simple answer is: the double quotes are part of the entity tag.  
> So a response header such as
>
> 	ETag: x
>
> would simply be invalid and should be ignored.

I am aware — but how is the receiving end meant to deal with them? Is  
it meant to keep the quotation marks around any quoted-string, even  
when that therefore results in non-exist things like a character set  
called "UTF-8" (with quotes)? Or does the behaviour need to be  
specific to each and every use of quoted-string need to have it  
defined separately?

- Geoffrey.

Received on Sunday, 28 October 2007 19:27:29 UTC