Re: CGI/1.1 draft
Rob McCool (robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Sun, 6 Mar 1994 16:47:11 --100
/*
* Re: CGI/1.1 draft by John Franks
* written on Mar 1, 9:40am.
*
* I guess I would favor keeping current practice, but I would not object
* violently a change in this area. I do want to make sure that the spec
* is very specific on this point though. If PATH_INFO is unescaped we
* must say so explicitly and say what this means, i.e. does unescaping
* include '+' -> space translation or just the %hex decoding. My
* understanding when I did this was that unescaping included both and that's
* the way my server works. If this is wrong then I would like to fix
* it. "URL decoding" might be a better term than "unescaping".
*/
A misconception I had was that + and ' ' were interchangable. Someone has
told me that in fact, no, the + is only applicable within a query string,
not within a URI. Since the spec. specifically says URL decoding and the URL
spec says no + to ' ' mapping in a URI, PATH_INFO should only have %
decoding done on it. I will be changing NCSA httpd's behavior to be % only
in PATH_INFO (but + and % in QUERY_STRING).
--Rob