URLs [OT]

[Petrus de Calguarium]

I am wondering:

usually a URL has the form
http://www.company.com/dir/subdir...

but lately, I have often come across
http://www.company.com//dir/subdir

What does this '//' mean?

[Petrus de Calguarium]

Sharpe, Sam J wrote:

>  what that represents is badly
>  configured web serving software 
Well, that would appear to be fedoraproject.org, as I typed 
download.fedoraproject.org and was automatically redirected to:

ftp://ftp.nrc.ca/pub/systems/linux/redhat/fedora/linux//

and another time to

http://mirror.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/mirror/fedora/linux//

etc...

[Sam Sharpe]

2009/3/13 Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen(a)gatech.edu&gt;:
>  Sharpe, Sam J wrote:
> > // is functionally equivalent to / - so what that represents is badly
> > configured web serving software as I would expect the output of each
> > URL to be the same.
>
>  That's not quite right.  See my other message and RFC 3986. 
Mmm.... accepted, but I've never seen a webserver that treats the two
differently without a bit of work.

But you're right - If I pass everything under http://somehost/ to a
script via mod_rewrite, which prints out /word1/word2/word3 I get:

//dir/subdir:
word1=
word2=dir
word3=subdir

/dir/subdir:
word1=dir
word2=subdir
word3=

That's with some simple PHP - so you must be correct about the
possibility of a difference in pages returned, but I'm going to claim
that when I said "functionally equivalent", I meant "according to the
functional behaviour of all web servers I have observed, these are
equivalent" ;o)

-- 
Sam

[Matthew Flaschen]

Sharpe, Sam J wrote:
>  // is functionally equivalent to / - so what that represents is
> badly
>  configured web serving software as I would expect the output of each
>  URL to be the same. 
That's not quite right.  See my other message and RFC 3986.

Matt Flaschen

[Matthew Flaschen]

Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
>  I am wondering:
>  
>  usually a URL has the form
>  http://www.company.com/dir/subdir...
>  
>  but lately, I have often come across
>  http://www.company.com//dir/subdir 
It's probably just a mistake.  But it is a valid URL, and can mean
whatever the server wants it to mean.  See RFC 3986.  There is no
requirement that segments (meaning the parts between slashes in the
path) have non-zero length.  So there is simply a slash then a blank
segment after the authority (hostname in this case)

Matt Flaschen

[Mauriat M]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Petrus de Calguarium
<kwhiskerz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  I am wondering:
>
>  usually a URL has the form
>  http://www.company.com/dir/subdir...
>
>  but lately, I have often come across
>  http://www.company.com//dir/subdir
>
>  What does this '//' mean? 
The same thing as '/'.  I would guess it is an error in whoever coded
the particular URL.  I guess since most servers default to unix
behaviour the '/' will work the same as '//'.

See for yourself:
http://fedoraproject.org///index.html

[mirandam@phoebe ~]$ ls ///etc///////X11///////
applnk      xdm      xorg.conf
fontpath.d  xinit    xorg.conf.livna-config-backup
prefdm      Xmodmap  Xresources

-Mauriat

[Chris Tyler]

On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 19:19 -0600, Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
>  I am wondering:
>  
>  usually a URL has the form
>  http://www.company.com/dir/subdir...
>  
>  but lately, I have often come across
>  http://www.company.com//dir/subdir
>  
>  What does this '//' mean? 
Usually that http://www.company.com/ and /dir/subdir were concatenated
by some script somewhere ... // is generally treated as /

-Chris

[Sam Sharpe]

2009/3/13 Petrus de Calguarium <kwhiskerz(a)gmail.com&gt;:
>  I am wondering:
>
>  usually a URL has the form
>  http://www.company.com/dir/subdir...
>
>  but lately, I have often come across
>  http://www.company.com//dir/subdir
>
>  What does this '//' mean? 
// is functionally equivalent to / - so what that represents is badly
configured web serving software as I would expect the output of each
URL to be the same.

-- 
Sam