> & in a query string should be passed as & or as %26 though many web > pages don't use this, even though the W3C HTML guidelines require it.
I don't believe that's accurate, Tony. Only if you are writing an HTML file need you use & ever and that's only because of the necessity to escape that character (&) in HTML; it has nothing to do with the URL. When a URL is in plain text, or passed to a web browser or whatever, it should simply be &, if it is to have a special meaning in the scheme of choice, i.e. HTTP uses it for separating name-value pairs in query strings, or %26 if it is not to have that special meaning (i.e. if you want & to actually be a part of a name or value). Of course, in passing that & or %26 you need to escape it appropriately: if on a shell commandline, you might need backslashes, if in HTML, you might need &, if in Vim, you might need backslashes sometimes. Because some people/software insist on using & where they should just use &, though, some software (PHP for example) contains, or can contain, code to treat & like & (often in a hacky way--in PHP there is another side effect), even though technically it shouldn't. > I suppose that if netrw has problems with the question mark (maybe for > internal reasons) it can always be passed as %3F No; it would lose its special meaning (beginning the query string in the URL), and would become part of the path part of the URL if you did that. Equally wrong. All this is detailed in the RFCs to do with URLs/URIs and HTTP. I don't have time to look up the relevant parts now, though. It has nothing to do with HTML, except for the & thing, but that's not about the URL, but how it's represented in HTML. All that said, I haven't double checked what I've written, and I could have some details wrong too. So refer to the standards for the gore! Regards, Ben. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
