UTF-8 Encode URLs

[InQuize]

When I try to play media file served by webfs in VLC all goes well, until there is some symbol in filename that does not pass input sanity checks.
In my case I'm having trouble with square brackets [ ].

It is a good practice to UTF-8 encode URLs so that
http://example.com/dir/sub dir/long filename with $ymbols & stuff.mp4
would look like
http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fdir%2Fsub%20dir%2Flong%20filename%20with%20%24ymbols%20%26%20stuff.mp4

If I manually encode links served by webfs with e.g. urlencoder.org, VLC does not through error and plays fine, so it should be a matter of fixing HTML, possibly as configurable option.

[LinRaymond2006]

Hello InQuize, hope these information helps:

rfc 1738 compliance

According to rfc 1738's requirement for URL, these characters must be encoded to printable US-ASCII using % encoding scheme:

1. non-graphic US-ASCII
2. unsafe characteres (and reserved characters)

excerpt from rfc 1738:

In addition, octets may be encoded by a character triplet consisting of the character "%" followed by the two hexadecimal digits (from "0123456789ABCDEF") which forming the hexadecimal value of the octet. (The characters "abcdef" may also be used in hexadecimal encodings.)

Octets must be encoded if they have no corresponding graphic character within the US-ASCII coded character set, if the use of the corresponding character is unsafe, or if the corresponding character is reserved for some other interpretation within the particular URL scheme.

rfc 2616 compliance

According to rfc 2616, the rfc-compliant implementation is required to decode the %-encoded octec so that it can be interpreted.

excerpt from rfc 2616

The Request-URI is transmitted in the format specified in section 3.2.1. If the Request-URI is encoded using the "% HEX HEX" encoding [42], the origin server MUST decode the Request-URI in order to properly interpret the request. Servers SHOULD respond to invalid Request-URIs with an appropriate status code.

Also refer to

1. rfc1738 section 2.2, URL Character Encoding Issues
   
2. rfc 2616 section 5.1.2, Request-URI

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!

[InQuize]

Yeah, pretty much. Good job citing all the docs.
I had trouble with reserved chars [ ] as part of RFC 3986 section 2.2 and so had to switch to sharing using Samba.
That urlencoder link I mentioned above also has a good chunk of info on the subject.

[LinRaymond2006]

Thanks for pointing that out!
It's definitely a topic I'll do further research on in near future.