Re: Testing URIs for equality

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Wed, 16 Mar 1994 23:09:40 --100

In message <2D876CE8@MSMAIL.INDY.TCE.COM>, Fisher Mark writes:
>
>Two things:
>1. I really hate to break existing code and/or documents; but
>2. Special cases in code or data are the software engineer's nightmare.
>
>It seems much simpler to allow everything to be escaped. In that case,
>multiple escaping would be prohibited, so that:
> %25%32%30
>is turned into:
> %20
>but not then turned into " " (single blank). The problem with this, of
>course, is -- how many servers and clients would this break?

I think I need more context to completely understand your example.
But if what you're saying is that
URI_compare("%25%32%30", "%2520") should return TRUE,
then I'm with you -- the first argument just has to be reduced
to canonical form before parsing or whatever...

If, on the other hand, you're saying that
URI_compare("%25%32%30", "%2520")
should accomplish this by undoing _all_ the escapes and doing:
strcmp("%20", "%20")
then we've got a problem. It doesn't show up in this case, but
what about

URI_compare("foo%23xxx", "foo#xxx");

by this suggestion, we end up with
strcmp("foo#xxx", "foo#xxx")
which returns TRUE, even though the first URI means
the file "foo#xxx"
and the second means
the "xxx" fragment of file "foo"
which are different things altogether.

Dan