277447 - URL handling

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Toni Kaskela]

A little annoyance with Firefox. If URL has ^ mark in it Firefox is unable to
open URL. Addres http://hammurab.no-ip.com:8033/exhorder/users/smeagol^/ is
generated by a bot by username. Other browsers seems to work with it but Firefox
renders this URL to http://hammurab.no-ip.com:8033/exhorder/users/smeagol%5E/
wich will not work... Is this because of Firefox or could it be fixed with
browser's setting? (If so, where the heck is that setting in Firefox?)

Comment 1

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20050107
Firefox/1.0+

Confirming

works in Opera, IE, not in FF

->NEW
->OS All
->unspecified (tr/br)
->minor

Comment 2

[Uri Bernstein]

It seems to me that Firefox is following the standard here. RFC 2396
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt) says in section 2.4.3., Excluded US-ASCII
Characters:

<quote>
Other characters are excluded because gateways and other transport agents are
known to sometimes modify such characters, or they are used as delimiters.

   unwise      = "{" | "}" | "|" | "\" | "^" | "[" | "]" | "`"

Data corresponding to excluded characters must be escaped in order to be
properly represented within a URI.
</quote>

So Firefox is doing correctly by escaping "^". It is the server's responsibility
to do the decoding - which in this case it fails to do.

This is of course a theoretical argument. In practice, it might be worth
violating the standard to achieve compatiblity with other browsers.

Comment 3

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

I vote for invalid, there doesn't seem to be a point in violating any specs here.

the server in question seems to be:
Server:	stats.mod/1.3.2
that does not sound like it is widely used. it seems to be a server serving IRC
channel stats, from what google tells me (I can't seem to reach its homepage
currently)

Comment 4

[Andreas Otte]

Yes, we follow RFC 2396 to the letter here. The server must decode this and
other servers do. Fix the server! Marking invalid.