[drakma-devel] Bug report: Overeager encoding of parameters

[Eric Benson]

Building your own URL only works for GET requests, not for POST requests.

I don't need to stop drakma from encoding query strings for my application, I can pass it the string with spaces and let it encode them to plus signs. I'm suggesting a useful, minor, upward-compatible addition to drakma's API. Perhaps drakma's interface is too high-level for the kind of application that might need more direct control of encoding and decoding. I can understand not wanting to add another keyword to http-request and another few lines to the documentation. That's your judgement call. Trivial-http and cl-curl are also available.

Anyway, thanks for listening, and thanks for the code...



----- Original Message ----
From: Edi Weitz <edi at agharta.de>
To: General interest list for Drakma and Chunga <drakma-devel at common-lisp.net>
Sent: Monday, July 7, 2008 9:41:29 AM
Subject: Re: [drakma-devel] Bug report: Overeager encoding of parameters

On Mon, 7 Jul 2008 09:08:18 -0700 (PDT), Eric Benson <eric_a_benson at yahoo.com> wrote:

> RFC 2396 has been superseded by RFC 3986, although that does not
> affect this case.

RFC 2396 is what is quoted in RFC 2616, so that's why I was referring
to it.

> http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_URI_Recommentations.html
>
> "Within the query string, the plus sign is reserved as shorthand
> notation for a space.  Therefore, real plus signs must be encoded.

That's what Drakma does.

> For the record, neither IE nor Firefox encodes plus signs when they
> are entered as part of the query.

They encode them if they are GET parameters, like Drakma.  Open the
attached HTML page in IE or Firefox and enter "a+b", then press the
Return key.

> It seems to me that http-request should make encoding of the
> parameters optional, since a client program may need to deal with
> encoded as well as unencoded strings. Otherwise, a caller of
> http-request that already has encoded parameters must explicitly
> decode them before calling.

No, you are free to build the URL for Drakma yourself.

Edi.




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