On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, you wrote:
>
> This looks pretty ugly to me. While it's nice to know that there's a
> workaround, IMHO REBOL should be taking care of this automatically when
> requesting URL's with special characters. Would someone like to file
> this as a bug report?
REBOL should not escape URLs automatically because in some situations escaped
and unescaped characters have different meanings in URLs, and REBOL has no way
of knowing what the user's intention in using the character was (i.e. whether
the character is supposed to have its special meaning or whether it is just a
component of a path name and needs to be escaped).
For instance semicolon and ampersand (";", "&") both have special functions in
URLs, but only if they are not escaped. If they are escaped then they can be
used in path names. The ";" in its escaped form may e.g. be needed in path
names when accessing files on a VMS system.
As a rule, escaping is not something you do when sending a URL to a web server,
but something you do when constructing a URL, because that is the time when you
know whether characters have special meanings or whether they are part of a
path. For correct results you need to URL-encode each component of a URL
separately, and then put the components together, separated by the various
special characters (":;&/" etc.) in their unescaped form.
--
Holger Kruse
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
