need to escape "/" in a fragment of a URI

• From: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
• Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:13:21 +1100
• To: "Media Fragment" <public-media-fragment@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <2c0e02830812092313q4be24623o29c712fb7155d600@mail.gmail.com>

Hi all,

I promised to investigate whether in a query component the "/"
character is allowed and whether it needs to be escaped.

I have looked at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt again, which is
the current URI standard.

According to section 3.4 Query, "/" is a legal character in the query
part of a URI and does not need to be escaped:

<< as query components
   are often used to carry identifying information in the form of
   "key=value" pairs and one frequently used value is a reference to
   another URI, it is sometimes better for usability to avoid percent-
   encoding those characters.>>

There is a reference to older, erroneous implementations that may have
a problem with it, but I would not worry too much about that.

So, in summary: no percent-encoding necessary of "/" in a query component.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 10 December 2008 07:14:05 UTC