Add to the limitations of the HTTP protocol the wider URI protocol: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/r
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Question
Which characters or strings can never be part of an URL?
Does someone know which characters (say, ¢) or strings (say, %%%) cannot be part of an URL for sure? I can't find a list of them online.
Please provide me with a list or a few examples.
Thanks!
Here's some background info that isn't necessary for answering the question.
I want to replace characters in a list of URLs that I store within a program. The program cannot store some of them, e.g. those containing 2 "=" signs.
e.g.
http://aleph.unibas.ch/F?c
would yield s.th. like
http://aleph.unibas.ch/F?c
In another step I convert these strings back to "=". Therefore I want banned characters that will never convert sth that is part of an URL.
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Answers
The short answer is: yes. The longer answer is: see my previous comment. Depending on your programming environment, you can use functions like UrlEncode to automatically prevent wrong characters for ending up in your string.
Very basic: include this: [A-Za-z0-9_-] and escape all the rest, it will put you on a safe side.
I can answer in more detail, but then I would like to know what part of the URL you want protected: protocol part (only letters), domain part (letters, digits, slightly depending on host), port part (digits only), path part (letters, digits, underscore and hyphen, no slashes, plus sign, percent, spaces etc), query part (depends, question mark, equal sign and ampersand prohibited), anchor part (depends).
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by: abelPosted on 2009-06-12 at 09:17:14ID: 24613697
The list is in the HTTP specification http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/r
The equal sign you mention is a legitimate part of the query part of a URL and separated the parameters. If it is there for not separating the parameters, it should be url encoded. The international characters are allowed in IRIs but not in URIs. In the URIs they should be escaped according to the url encoding scheme which is, in short, the %-sign plus the UTF-8 bytes of the character. The ¢ for instance becomes %c2%a2 inside a URL.
-- Abel --