[Yum-devel] [UG] url encoding advice

[Michael Stenner]

OK, someone just filed a bug against urlgrabber that brings up an
interesting issue: pre-encoded urls.

  http://devel.linux.duke.edu/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=539

The summary: if you give urlgrabber an encoded url, it re-encodes it.
For example:

  a) (raw url)    http://place.com/foo bar
  b) (encoded)    http://place.com/foo%20bar
  c) (re-encoded) http://place.com/foo%2520bar

urlgrabber gets (b), see's the "%" and encodes that as %25.  It seems
other tools will be clever and try to detect whether something needs
to be reencoded.  What's the best way to do that?

  1) be a hard-ass and say "urlgrabber expects unencoded urls"
  2) provide an option that says whether or not the url is encoded
     (ugly and impractical)
  3) try and be clever - for example, encode " " but not "%" (broken
     behavior in the strictest sense)
  4) allow for an "encoder object" that can be used to implement the
     desired encoding policy, perhaps with the default behavior being
     (3)

Number (4) is the most work, but is probably the best way to go.
Thoughts?

					-Michael
-- 
  Michael D. Stenner                            mstenner at ece.arizona.edu
  ECE Department and Optical Sciences Center                520-626-1619
  University of Arizona                                         ECE 524G