[jcifs] Re: SMB URL encoding/decoding

[Michael B Allen]

On Sat, 23 Feb 2002 22:54:14 -0600
"Christopher R. Hertel" <crh at ubiqx.org> wrote:

> Michael B Allen wrote:
> > 
> > On Sat, 23 Feb 2002 22:27:59 -0600
> > "Christopher R. Hertel" <crh at ubiqx.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > A note... I looked all through the RFC and found nothing about
> > > translating the '+' into a space.  Annoying, as I know it was there
> > > in the early days.
> > 
> > Oh, great. So there's a difference between the MIME x-www-form-urlencoded
> > format and http URL encoding. Looks like just the '+' is different
> > though.
> 
> MIME may decode the "+" at the MIME level, before it becomes visible as a
> URL string...  I'm just guessing.  I don't have a lot to go on, just that
> I looked through and found examples in the RFC where a space was
> translated to %20 but no mention of "+" being used.

Actually it's important that we do not use Java's URLDecoder then. Since
we have to run all paths through a decoder routine any '+' would have
to be escaped if we used java.net.URLDecoder. We should provide our
own decode() that' *does not* decode '+'. If of course a user uses '+'
they will get File not found or create files with '+' but that would be
user error because a) they shouldn't be enoding path components b) it's
not defined by the spec and c) they should use the jCIFS provided
decode(). I wonder why Java didn't stop encoding the '+'. I guess if
they decode it they have to encode it too and either way they start to
ruin backwards compatability.

Mike

-- 
May The Source be with you.