libsmbclient url encoding is one-way but two-way is needed

[Christopher R. Hertel]

I'm not sure whether the URLs passed in and out of libsmbclient should be 
encoded or unencoded, but I consider symmetry--in general--to be a really 
good thing in this type of code.

I'm in a class today and sending e'mail during short breaks (while the 
instructor helps other folks), so my answers are fairly thin.  Sorry.

Chris -)-----

On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 01:02:57PM -0400, Derrell.Lipman at UnwiredUniverse.com wrote:
> When a URL is passed to libsmbclient, it is "decoded"; i.e. %xx is converted
> to the character thereby represented.  This is all well and good.
> 
> When an opendir/readir sequence is done, file names, possibly containing the
> '%' character, are returned to the user *unencoded*.  This means that if you
> have a path name which you opendir(), read a file name using readdir(), append
> the file name to the path name, and attempt to smbc_open(), smbc_stat(),
> etc. the file, it will fail because the file name _actually_ contains a
> percent sign (really a full percent sign encoding), but the percent sign and
> following characters are being (undesirably, in this case) decoded by
> smbc_open() or smbc_stat().  This can occur under very normal circumstances
> when, as one of many examples I found, you read the Temporary Internet Files
> folder which contains encoded urls as file names.
> 
> It seems to me that if we're passing url strings _to_ the libsmbclient
> functions, we should provide url strings as return values from them (or at
> least provide an option to do so).  Returning encoded strings would be
> undesirable if you wanted to display the names to a user who couldn't care
> less about how the internal encoding is done, but highly desirable when the
> name will be passed back to the client library.
> 
> What's your take on it?  Provide an option to have returned folder/file names
> urlencoded?  Provide a function in the library which may be called with a
> string (the returned folder/file name), to urlencode it?  Or just leave it
> entirely up to each user of the library to implement his own encoding
> function?
> 
> Derrell

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
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