CODEWITHSUNDEEP
urlsanitization
ideasman42
ideasman42

Reputation: 47968

Characters a URL can't end with?

What characters (if any) can a web browser URL (http/https) not end with?

As far as I can tell, control characters aren't used e.g.

Is there a complete list of such characters?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 751

Answers (1)

unor
unor

Reputation: 96507

There are three cases how a URI can end:

  • with the path component (if it has no query/fragment)

      http://example.com/
  http://example.com/path
  http://example.com/path/path

  • with the query component (if it has no fragment)

      http://example.com/?query
  http://example.com/path?query
  http://example.com/path/path?query

  • with the fragment component

      http://example.com/#fragment
  http://example.com/path#fragment
  http://example.com/path/path#fragment
  http://example.com/?query#fragment
  http://example.com/path?query#fragment
  http://example.com/path/path?query#fragment

The URI standard doesn’t place any restrictions on the end of these three components (Path, Query, Fragment), so the same characters are allowed that can appear anywhere else in the components:

space (from testing seems this is stripped)

URIs can have (multiple) space characters at the end (in all three cases), but they have to be percent-encoded. Spaces aren’t allowed unencoded, no matter where.

http://example.com/path-ending-with-four-spaces-%20%20%20%20

If a user agent tries to convert user input into a valid URI (i.e., percent-encoding all characters that can’t appear in the component), it might assume that trailing spaces aren’t intended to be part of the URI, and strip them.

The same goes for tab and newline characters. They can be part of URIs if percent-encoded.

Upvotes: 2

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