CODEWITHSUNDEEP
resturl
Carlo Bertuccini
Carlo Bertuccini

Reputation: 20051

URL: semicolon instead of question mark

I'm calling a web service in this format:

http://some.server/rest/resource;a=b

It works but is this valid? I've seen the ; used as a replacement for the & but never seen such an url. I've been looking for an answer but did not find a valid one. If valid what is the meaning of this kind of url?

Upvotes: 14

Views: 18788

Answers (3)

Dmitriy Pichugin
Dmitriy Pichugin

Reputation: 418

RFC2396 where path parameters were specified is obsolete. newer version is RFC 3986 -- this one does not have path parameters before the query string formally specified, however still has it in section 5.4.1 in examples.

Upvotes: 3

Sebastiaan van den Broek
Sebastiaan van den Broek

Reputation: 6351

This is a part of the path parameters and not part of the query parameters. You can find detailed information on how URLs can be built at http://www.skorks.com/2010/05/what-every-developer-should-know-about-urls/

Edit: I was actually looking for this link earlier which explains it even better and shows you some weird but valid cases: https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/misc/lunatech%5Ewhat-every-webdev-must-know-about-url-encoding/ (originally at the now dead url http://blog.lunatech.com/2009/02/03/what-every-web-developer-must-know-about-url-encoding)

But anyway, this is valid: http://www.blah.com/some/crazy/path.html;param1=foo;param2=bar

Upvotes: 18

aCa
aCa

Reputation: 157

This might answer your question: Semicolon as URL query separator

We recommend that HTTP server implementors, and in particular, CGI implementors support the use of ";" in place of "&" to save authors the trouble of escaping "&" characters in this manner.

Upvotes: 0

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