Are square brackets not allowed in a URI?

ruby-talk
1

I could swear that this URL works:

http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/players/189_YellOw[ArnC]

    ...but parsing this with URI throws an exception claiming that this is
invalid.
    I don't know exactly what URI's are but Mechanize is using it to parse
URLs and this appears to be a valid URL so it looks like either Mechanize's
bug is in using Ruby's URI module or the URI module in not accepting valid
URLs. Either that or there's something I'm totally not understanding (like
my browser lying to me or something). Can someone tell me what's going on?
    Thank you!

2

Your browser is, in fact, lying to you, the URL it opens is :
http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/players/189_YellOw[ArnC]

Browsers always (un)escape URLs for readability, take a look for
example at the way markdown escapes email addresses:
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#autolink

While it's unfortunate for us coders, not properly escaped hrefs in
links are a very common thing on the web, fortunately there are not
that many URIs that use special characters, and sometimes people
actually do escape them before slating them into HTML, but not always.

There's no simple workaround i can think of, short of patching uri.rb

^ manveru

···

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality <ihatespam@hotmail.com> wrote:

   I could swear that this URL works:

TLPD - BW Korean - Player Information - YellOw[ArnC]

   ...but parsing this with URI throws an exception claiming that this is
invalid.
   I don't know exactly what URI's are but Mechanize is using it to parse
URLs and this appears to be a valid URL so it looks like either Mechanize's
bug is in using Ruby's URI module or the URI module in not accepting valid
URLs. Either that or there's something I'm totally not understanding (like
my browser lying to me or something). Can someone tell me what's going on?
   Thank you!

3

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2396.html

"

  Other characters are excluded because gateways and other transport
    agents are known to sometimes modify such characters, or they are
    used as delimiters.

    unwise = "{" | "}" | "|" | "\" | "^" | "[" | "]" | "`"

    Data corresponding to excluded characters must be escaped in order to
    be properly represented within a URI.

"

a @ http://codeforpeople.com/

···

On Aug 13, 2008, at 10:12 PM, Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:

   I could swear that this URL works:

TLPD - BW Korean - Player Information - YellOw[ArnC]

   ...but parsing this with URI throws an exception claiming that this is
invalid.
   I don't know exactly what URI's are but Mechanize is using it to parse
URLs and this appears to be a valid URL so it looks like either Mechanize's
bug is in using Ruby's URI module or the URI module in not accepting valid
URLs. Either that or there's something I'm totally not understanding (like
my browser lying to me or something). Can someone tell me what's going on?
   Thank you!

--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama