I have to design a RESTful client and service in Java. For a GET request, i need to send a regEx pattern as a query parameter.
in the client i'm sending the pattern as
http://localhost:6520/restservice/foo?pattern=^BP$
i'm getting Illegal Endpoint address exception.
I even tried
http://localhost:6520/restservice/foo?pattern='^BP$'
and it still gives the same exception. Can anyone help me with this?
The ^ is an illegal character in URL's and the $ is a reserved character in URL's. You'd like to URL-encode those characters first. The correct URL would then end up to be http://localhost:6520/restservice/foo?pattern=%5eBP%24
Most server side programming languages and view technologies offer facilities to convert URL's that way. Since it's unclear which one you're using, we can't give any hints how to do this. You now at least know the right keywords to search on: "URL encoding". Google around together with the programming language as keyword.
Related
https://www.airbnb.com/help?audience=host?audience=guest?audience=host?audience=host?audience=host
The URL above was created occasionally by me.
A normal URL to me has one question mark while all parameters are distinct. So in my opinion, this URL is abnormal.
What seems weird to me is that it still works and my browser has no complaint about it.
Would anyone explain it to me?
The first ? indicates the query component. The query component is terminated by the first following #, or the end of the URL.
So, this is the query component of your URL:
audience=host?audience=guest?audience=host?audience=host?audience=host
Within the query component, it’s perfectly fine to use ? characters, they don’t have any special meaning there (list of all allowed characters in the query).
While parameters in the query typically are in the name=value format, separated by &, this is just a convention (it’s what the encoding type application/x-www-form-urlencoded in HTML forms produces). Site authors can use whatever format they want.
I'm reading the book, HTTP - The Definitive Guide, from which I get the URL general format:
<scheme>://<user>:<password>#<host>:<port>/<path>;<params>?<query>#<frag>
The <params> part said,
The path component for HTTP URLs can be broken into path segments. Each segment can have its own params. For example:
http://www.joes-hardware.com/hammers;sale=false/index.html;graphics=true
In my opinion, path params can also be used to query resources like query strings, but why it's barely seen?
And I'm a Rails developer, and I haven't seen its usage or specification in Rails. Does Rails not support it?
You ask several questions
Why do we not see ;params=value much?
Because query parameters using ?=& are widely supported, like in PHP, .net, ruby etc.. with convenient functions like $_GET[].
While params delimited by ; or , do not have these convenient helper functions. You do encounter them at Rest api's, where they are used in the htaccess or the controller to get relevant parameters.
Does Ruby support params delimited with ;?
Once you obtain the current url, you can get all parameters with a simple regex call. This is also why they are used in htaccess files, because they are easily regexed (is that a word?).
Both parameter passing structures are valid and can be used, the only clear reason why one is used more often than the other is because of preference and support in the different languages.
Just say I have the following url that has a query string parameter that's an url:
http://www.someSite.com?next=http://www.anotherSite.com?test=1&test=2
Should I url encode the next parameter? If I do, who's responsible for decoding it - the web browser, or my web app?
The reason I ask is I see lots of big sites that do things like the following
http://www.someSite.com?next=http://www.anotherSite.com/another/url
In the above, they don't bother encoding the next parameter because I'm guessing, they know it doesn't have any query string parameters itself. Is this ok to do if my next url doesn't include any query string parameters as well?
RFC 2396 sec. 2.2 says that you should URL-encode those symbols anywhere where they're not used for their explicit meanings; i.e. you should always form targetUrl + '?next=' + urlencode(nextURL).
The web browser does not 'decode' those parameters at all; the browser doesn't know anything about the parameters but just passes along the string. A query string of the form http://www.example.com/path/to/query?param1=value¶m2=value2 is GET-requested by the browser as:
GET /path/to/query?param1=value¶m2=value2 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
(other headers follow)
On the backend, you'll need to parse the results. I think PHP's $_REQUEST array will have already done this for you; in other languages you'll want to split over the first ? character, then split over the & characters, then split over the first = character, then urldecode both the name and the value.
According to RFC 3986:
The query component is indicated by the first question mark ("?")
character and terminated by a number sign ("#") character or by the
end of the URI.
So the following URI is valid:
http://www.example.com?next=http://www.example.com
The following excerpt from the RFC makes this clear:
... as query components are often used to carry identifying
information in the form of "key=value" pairs and one frequently used
value is a reference to another URI, it is sometimes better for
usability to avoid percent-encoding those characters.
It is worth noting that RFC 3986 makes RFC 2396 obsolete.
for example this image:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BFmDUA5CcAAmcBl.jpg
then I add a color symbol to send query string:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BFmDUA5CcAAmcBl.jpg:large
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BFmDUA5CcAAmcBl.jpg:small
I googled that is twitter image
what coding language can achieve this?
php? ruby on rails?
or any htaccess rewrite rule?
Any.
It has nothing to do with programming languages, but with CGI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface
The colon is however not a valid part of the CGI spec, so the server receiving the request will probably parse it in code.
Note though that the CGI spec defines '&' as separator between different variable/value pairs, which results in incorrect (X)HTML when used in <a> tags. This is because it doesn't define a valid entity. To remedy this, at least in PHP, you can change this separator: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.arg-separator.output
I am developing an android application and I am using a RESTful service to connect to SQL azure database. I need to use this RESTful url:
http://example.com/wcfDataService1.svc/wn_synset?$filter=word%20eq%20'child's_game'&$select=synset_id,w_num,word,ss_type,wn_gloss/gloss&$expand=wn_gloss
As you can see am looking for this word (child's_game) in the table wn_synset.
The problem is the single quote (') in child's_game. As you can see it puts the word inside quotes '...' so when it finds the quote in child's_game it thinks it is the end of the word and the rest is error.
How can i solve this problem?
You can url-encode the ' symbols with %27. See http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp and try it in the "Try it yourself" section.
Edit: (moved correct guess from comments to the answer itself)
Or is it just, that the SQL-Server on the server side gets it wrong? Like it builds a select * from wn_synset where word = 'child's game' and there's the error? Then you'll have to look up how you escape single quotes for your database -- probably it's by using two single quotes (''), so perhaps try to send child''s game instead of child's game.
There is no problem, or in other words, your URL is not a URL. If it were a URL, ther wouldn't be a '. Of course, you can have this ' in your URL, so to speak. But it needs to be escaped in accordance with the rules for URLs. You may want to look at URLEncoder and Uri.