On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, you wrote:
> I'm trying to loggin to a web page that needs a name and
> password.
>
> The problem is the name has a "\" in it. This cases the URL
> parsing to barf.
>
> How do I do this?
>
> http://my\name:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The official standard for URLs (RFC 1738) specifies that certain
characters may never appear in URLs. The "\" character is among
them, i.e. the above URL with the "\" in it is invalid. That is a universal
rule, independent of which language or browser you use. Some
browsers may not always strictly enforce that rule, but REBOL does.
In order to send those special characters to the server as part of
URL components you need to hex-encode them, i.e. normally
(from web browsers) the following should work:
http://my%5cname:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unfortunately, with REBOL this currently does not work, because
REBOL already uses the %-escape mechanism to allow its own
special characters (";" for comments, "[", "]" for blocks etc.)
to be escaped, and therefore removes any escaping from URLs
before parsing the URL into components, so even with the %5c
the internal, scanned URL in REBOL has the "\" in it, and you will
still get a "URL Error" from the URL parser.
The solution (I hope) is to use "double-escaping", i.e. escape
the "%" in "%5c" again into a "%25", resulting in
http://my%255cname:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
This won't win a beauty contest but should work, at least in the
current version. Please try not to rely on this trick too much
though, because it may very well change in a future version,
in favor of a nicer, easier solution.
--
Holger Kruse
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
