Re: Commas in URLs?

<posted & mailed>

AES wrote:

> In article <Xns96B59316C628jkorpelacstutfi@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> > given that not a few applications and databases use
>> > the comma as a separator or delimiter to separate text and/or numerical
>> > entries into tables, database keyword files, and the like (not to
>> > mention newsgroup names in the Newsgroups: field immediately above, or
>> > email addresses in email clients).
>>
>> ... I think you just added to the confusion by mentioning things that
>> have nothing to do with URL syntax.
>>
>
> Perhaps I wasn't clear enough about what I meant.
>
> As seen by ordinary users, URLs appear as text strings. Many people
> probably collect them in text files and process those text files using
> text editors or other programs.
>
> For example I've collected arrays of data that included URLs and other
> stuff in multi-line comma-delimited text files and loaded these arrays
> into Excel spreadsheets or Word tables, just because this was a fast,
> simple, convenient way to sort and manipulate the data. Tab-delimited
> entries are also commonly used for this purpose, but if you have many
> entries per line the page gets very wide with tab-delimited files.
>
> Many bibliographic citations contain URLs these days, and the widely
> used bibliographic database app EndNote has a "URL" field in each entry.
> It's also not unlikely, however, that someone would use a URL as one of
> the multiple keywords in EndNote Keywords field, and the default
> delimiter for individual keywords in that field is the comma.
>
> Mathematica -- a powerful tool for manipulating text as well as numbers
> -- uses the comma as the standard separator in its Lists; and it would
> be very hard to change that.
>
> I'm not saying that the people who defined the syntax for URLs had any
> obligation to rule out commas because of this. But given the _very_
> widespread use of the comma as a default separator, if they'd done so,
> they would have avoided causing hassles in cases like these; and the
> fact that so few URLs actually contain commas seems to indicate it might
> not have been a bad decision.

There are almost always issues, if you mix 'languages' where some characters
have special meaning. Just take URIs in HTML where the commonly used
character & has to be escaped. It's impossible to avoid this.

--
Benjamin Niemann
Email: pink at odahoda dot de
WWW: http://www.odahoda.de/
.