Hi,

When I use TFPHTTPClient to fetch a page with a colon in the file name it appends a slash "/". For example:

  Client:=TFPHTTPClient.Create(nil);
  Response:=TMemoryStream.Create;
  Client.Get('http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Image:Acs_demos.jpg',Response);

It fetches "/Image:Acs_demos.jpg/".

The / is appended in ParseURI when extracting the document name. For some reason it stops at a colon:

  // now s is 'hier-part' per RFC3986
  // Extract the document name (nasty...)
  for i := Length(s) downto 1 do
    if s[i] = '/' then
    begin
      ...
    end else if s[i] = ':' then
      break
    else
      ...

Why?

Mattias

Probably some misguided attempt at handling file:///c:/something

You can remove that code.

Michael.

Thinking about it, maybe it was designed to also handle That should be checked.

Michael.

The fact it appends a slash at the end is probably because it thinks it's a path...

But, just out of curiosity... isn't it a malformed *http* url if it contains a colon?

Cheer, A.

I doubt that mediawiki uses malformed urls.
And any browser and http client uses it without warning.

Mattias

I doubt that mediawiki uses malformed urls. And any browser and http client uses it without warning.

as I said, it was out of curiosity.

Googling around anyway, shows that there are some special characters out there (obviously), which are meant to compose the url itself: colon, slash, dot, q.mark, ampersand, percent, etc. etc.

To use them in a url for your special purposes, you should at least escape them; if not for anything else, at least for those not-so-smart browsers (or http-client components...).

Try replacing the colon with %3A and see if the component adds a slash at the end as well. It should not IMHO.

Anyway, "http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org?Image=Acs_demos.jpg" is not that ugly. Probably it's not so sophisticated, but can do the very same job.

Cheers, A.

Yes, this is a workaround.

But my question is why only the fphttpclient has a problem with colon while all others support it. I hope this can be changed somehow. I don't know if in ParseURI or in fphttpclient.

Mattias

[...] Anyway, "http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org?Image=Acs_demos.jpg" is not that ugly. Probably it's not so sophisticated, but can do the very same job.

No. This does not work with mediawiki.

Mattias

ParseURI, most likely.
fphttpclient doesn't do any processing of the URL except passing it to ParseURI.

Michael.

No. This does not work with mediawiki.

Of course not... that was just an example.

A.