501719 - URL encoding prior to copying to the clipboard on win32 platforms (may also apply to other platforms)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 824887

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[yumbelie]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Any address URI that is copied from Firefox 3.5 that contains reserved characters, is now escaped. E.g. the URL: http://www.google.co.uk?a=((S(hello)) when copied from the address bar *after execution* becomes: http://www.google.co.uk/?a=%28%28hello%29 in any paste target.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Enter URL: http://www.google.co.uk?a=((S(hello)) into address bar
2. Press [Enter]
3. Copy URL from address bar
4. Paste into note pad
Actual Results:  
http://www.google.co.uk/?a=%28%28hello%29

Expected Results:  
The unescaped URL that is displayed in the address bar: http://www.google.co.uk?a=((S(hello)) 

Pasted the unescaped URL.

Comment 1

[yumbelie]

May be linked to BUGID: 479039.

This *does not* mimic the behaviour of previous versions of Firefox (Pre 3.5), nor is it in line with WYSIWYG, since the URL is not changed in the address bar. 

It should be noted that brackets are frequently used in ASP.NET websites to store the session ID - E.g. http://www.mysite.co.uk/(S(pghisq55kduslai44imx4bbq))/somepage.aspx

As a side note I'd add that, as a developer, it's annoying to now have to reformat URI's that are escaped before being able to use them in other browsers (E.g. IE).

Comment 2

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Reserved characters are allowed to use in URI. Moreover, we can't percent encode them arbitrarily.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-2.2
> URIs that differ in the replacement of a reserved character with its
> corresponding percent-encoded octet are not equivalent.  Percent-
> encoding a reserved character, or decoding a percent-encoded octet
> that corresponds to a reserved character, will change how the URI is
> interpreted by most applications.  Thus, characters in the reserved
> set are protected from normalization and are therefore safe to be
> used by scheme-specific and producer-specific algorithms for
> delimiting data subcomponents within a URI.
So the current behavior will violate the spec.

Comment 3

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him)]

This is caused by bug 458565.
Dao, could you take this?

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

This was the intended outcome of bug 458565. Leaving parentheses unencoded would break third-party software (such as bugzilla, as well-demonstrated by comment 0.)