Re: Relative URIs strike again

[Mike Moran]

On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 08:42 PM, Michael Becke wrote:

These cases are partially handled as of now.

<a href="">""</a>
Does not work, but should. This falls into the case of abnormal URIs according to the RFC. I think Armando was working on a fix for this.

Btw, here is an example of an empty URI seen more often:
<FORM action="" method="post">
...form contents...
</FORM>

This is actually quite useful if it is returned by a Servlet as it means "submit back to me".

<a href="#">"#"</a>
<a href="#anchor">"#anchor"</a>
Both of these cases work correctly in the most recent code.

But what exactly is the correct behaviour? At least two major browsers implement this behaviour in a different way than you would immediately expect. This could just be a bug in them, or it could be a legitimate ambiguity. To clarify, which of the following do you interpret as the correct behaviour?

["base" + "rel" = "abs"]
A:
"http://www.foo.com/foop.html"; + "" = "http://www.foo.com/foop.html";
"http://www.foo.com/foop.html"; + "#" = "http://www.foo.com/foop.html";

B:
"http://www.foo.com/foop.html"; + "" = "http://www.foo.com/foop.html";
"http://www.foo.com/foop.html"; + "#" = "http://www.foo.com/foop.html#";

There are more actual possible permutations than A and B but they are two likely groups of choices.

I wrote a little snippet[1] to test the URI behaviour and got the following:

HttpClient:
"http://www.foo.com/foop.html"; + "" = "http://www.foo.com/foop.html";
"http://www.foo.com/foop.html"; + "#" = "http://www.foo.com/foop.html";

It would seem that HttpClient is doing A. Note that I just did a cvs update right now and didn't apply any patches, so I may have missed some code that is pending.

Incidentally, when I tried a relative URI of "#foop" I got the following:

"http://www.foo.com/foop.html"; + "#foop" = "http://www.foo.com/foop.html";

Surely this is incorrect?

This may be due to the fact that the URI class lops off any fragment when you construct it eg (new URI("http://www.foo.com/foop.html#foop";)).toString()
= http://www.foo.com/foop.html
I wrote a small test case for this[2].

Thanks,

[1]: Snippet:
public class URIMain
{
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
{
String base = args[0];
String rel = "";
if (args.length >= 2) {
rel = args[1];
}
URI baseURI = new URI(base);
URI uri = new URI(baseURI, rel);
System.out.println("\"" + baseURI + "\" + \"" + rel + "\" = \""
+ uri + "\"");
System.out.println("\"" + base + "\" + \"" + rel + "\" = \""
+ uri + "\"");
}
}

[2]: Test case:
public class TestURI extends TestNoHost {

...

public void testURIConstructorKeepsFrag() throws Exception {
String origURIWithFrag = "http://www.foo.com/foo#frag";;
URI uri = new URI(origURIWithFrag);
String asString = uri.toString();
assertTrue("Doesn't drop fragment"
+ " expected: \"" + origURIWithFrag + "\""
+ " actual: \"" + asString + "\"",
origURIWithFrag.equals(asString));
}

...
}

--
Mike


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