1375916 - URL hash converts spaces to %20

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Networking, defect, P5)

Description

[Rick Byers]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3135.4 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Read the 'hash' of a URL with a space in it, eg: <a href="#foo bar">
https://jsbin.com/zihepoq




Actual results:

The 'hash' is returned as "#foo%20bar"


Expected results:

Chrome, Safari and Edge all return "#foo bar", as required by the spec at https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#fragment-state  (there's a validation error, but that's irrelevant - parsing continues).

See https://w3c-test.org/url/a-element.html "lolscheme:x x#x x" test case.  It fails on Firefox with: assert_equals: href expected "lolscheme:x x#x x" but got "lolscheme:x%20x#x%20x"

The Google Search team said this was causing pain for them - meant they needed a special code path to handle Firefox's unique behavior here.

Comment 1

[Rick Byers]

Note that some related behavior was discussed in bug 1184589 and bz said:

> Per spec, such as it is, at https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#fragment-state the behavior is ... well, it depends.
>  It basically preserves whatever was passed in, afaict.  So if you do:
>
>  location.hash = "doug turner";
>
> then location.hash will be "doug turner".

Which is not what's happening here.

I tested on the latest Firefox Nightly (56.0a1 build 20170623151754)

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Generally looks like a duplicate of bug 1184589...

Comment 3

[Rick Byers]

I didn't think so.  That bug is WAI, Firefox changing to match the spec in preserving the %20 when it was there in the URL (as required by the spec) even though the UI is unescaping that and displaying it as a space.

In this case the URL contains an actual space character and Firefox is converting that INTO a %20, something the web-platform-test is explicitly verifying does NOT happen.

Comment 4

[Dragana Damjanovic [:dragana]]

Valentin, can you take a look?

Comment 5

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] {{ PTO 3 July - 3 August }}]

I think it's worth discussing this again, post firefox-57.

Comment 6

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258

Comment 7

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] {{ PTO 3 July - 3 August }}]

Will wait for the github discussion to end before closing this bug.

Comment 8

[Anne (:annevk)]

We decided to change this in the URL Standard. It now aligns with Firefox for U+0020 in fragments.