On Tue, 25 Mar 2003 21:39:26 +0100 Stephan Kulow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi! > > I looked into the URL handling libsmbclient is doing and it's > lacking quite some of the stuff that the DRAFT specifies (and > some of the stuff that generally are required for URIs). Is > someone working on that? > > I'm currently preparing some patches, but hate C programming > enough to dump it for some other solution :) > > Greetings, Stephan Please look at the jCIFS mailing list for discussions in February about the SMB URL. There was an interesting discussion about Unicode hanlding. The problem of course is that URLs require characters outside of ASCII to be escaped with %HH hex escapes. This is of course not very reasonable with SMB URLs so hex escaping is not required. In practice this should not be a problem because these URLs are not submitted as parameters to text based RPCs like HTTP GET requests. We did reach an important conclusion that would be influential to anyone writing an SMB URL parser. That is, even though SMB URLs do not require Unicode characters be escaped (for practical reasons) they should be able to decode escaped Unicode characters. This begs the question; how do you escape Unicode characters? The prevailing answer appears to be specified in the W3C IRI documents which suggest each escape should be treated as a byte in a UTF-8 multibyte sequence. Otherwise, the SMB URL is reasonably well defined. Unicode handling was the only remaining issue I believe. The jCIFS client implements all of this functionality minus the decoding of escaped UTF-8 sequences. Please join the jCIFS mailing list if you have specific questions. We have had many interesting discussions there about the SMB URL, we have implemented it completely, and there are three people who understand it quite well. Chris and Eric have the brains. Me type. I'm not familiar with the state of the libsmbclient SMB URL handling. Mike -- A program should be written to model the concepts of the task it performs rather than the physical world or a process because this maximizes the potential for it to be applied to tasks that are conceptually similar and, more important, to tasks that have not yet been conceived.
