Handling + in document searches

Tony Johnson (TONYJ@scs.slac.stanford.edu)
Thu, 25 Feb 1993 23:24 PDT


I would like to reraise an issue I have mentioned before but not obtained a
clear answer on.

At SLAC we are using WWW as a means of accessing a set of High Energy Physics
databases maintained here (SPIRES). One common usage is to search for
particular particle types, for example PI+. There is an immediate problem in
that the + symbol is treated specially in search strings by the current
http-daemons, namely it is changed to a space (for largely historic reasons).

I would like to propose the following:

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ALL browsers should perform the following translations on search strings typed
in by the user:

+ " % and <space> should be replaced by %nn where nn is the ASCII
code for the translated character

ALL daemons should translate %nn in search strings back to the appropriate
character. For historical reasons the + should continue to be translated to
<space> as now.

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Comments????? Can we do it tomorrow?

Tony