Re: parameter quoting - LC comment on draft-nottingham-http-link-header-07.txt

Mike Burrows wrote:
> Hi Julian (and all),
> 
>     Which made have a closer look at existing parameters (sorry for not
>     bringing this up earlier):
> 
>                         | ( "type" "=" type-name "/" subtype-name )
> 
>     I believe this *definitively* needs quoting, as "/" is a separator
>     character in HTTP and thus can not appear in a token.
> 
> 
> But is 'type-name "/" subtype-name' a token?  I didn't interpret as such 
> - in fact I assumed (perhaps erroneously) that it was in fact two tokens 
> separated by "/".
> 
> Regards,
> Mike
> ...

You are right, it's not. But, in general, parameter values either take 
tokens or quoted-strings, so a generic parser of HTTP parameters would 
fail to parse this correctly.

Maybe that's not a big issue in practice, because people use custom 
parser per header field, but it would be good if we could avoid that.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 21 January 2010 15:09:14 UTC