Thomas,
I don't think it's DOS. The quote you gave spoke specifically of PATHs
... In pulling an RTFM I find that "pathnames are limited to 63
characters." [That was with DOS 3.30]
The DOS delimiter on URLs would be the length of characters allowed in a
command line statement. I persisted in my RTFM efforts, but failed to
find confirmation of the ~250 character limit for command lines.
However, even if a URL exceeded the maximums allowed by DOS, it's
immaterial; the DOS software simply needs to send the string in what
amounts to 'packets' ... breaking it up into pieces that DOS can
swallow, and uploading it that way until the field is completed and the
EOL character [or other delimiter] sent.
i.e. the character strings in a GIF file far exceed what you could put
on a DOS command line; that's immaterial. It gets sent in pieces and
saved in pieces and then processed in pieces. And we see a GIF
picture.
Where a problem can occur is if the software refuses/is unable to store
the full length of something. i.e. if the software says "field xyz will
never exceed 200 characters," anything in excess of 200 characters will
be ignored and only 200 characters will be processed. If the foreign
server needs all 262 originally input characters to do something, the
200 characters processed by the software won't work.
l.d.
====
On Sat, 27 Jan 2001 03:23:04 -0500 (EST), Thomas Mueller wrote:
> (from Jake Young):
>> I've found that JPEGs in rather deeply nested directories
>> weren't displaying after converting. It's a URL-length limit
>> rather than going "too deep". Below shows how far (or long)
>> I've been able to go -- it roughly corresponds to all but the
>> file-extension showing in the URL-box on a 640-wide screen.
>> file:C:\a2345678\b2345678\c2345678\d2345678\e\12345678.jpg
>> Go beyond this limit and the conversions in cache will have
>> their names truncated: BlahBlah.bm then BlahBlah.b then
>> BlahBlah then BlahBla "et seq". The conversions will display
>> OK if re-named, but on other occasions they've been distorted
>> -- I've not really looked into this.
> Maybe this is due to a DOS path-length limitation rather than a bug in Arachne?
> I think full file name with path is limited to 66 characters in DOS. I just
> checked Microsoft MS-DOS 5.0 User's Guide and Reference: "MS-DOS recognizes
> paths of up to 66 characters (including the drive letter and colon)."
-- Arachne V1.70;rev.3, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
