Re: clone from url with email address as username?(escaping @ symbol)

From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel@haxx.se>
Date: Sep 29, 2009, 20:38 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0909292228120.23903@tvnag.unkk.fr>
In-Reply-To: <vpqws3hpqr1.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>

On Tue, 29 Sep 2009, Matthieu Moy wrote:

>> Exactly. So curl is not "wrong", it just can't work around this user-error.
>
> It may not want work around user-errors, but you can hardly say that
> it _can't_.

It can't work around this error. In theory we could make it GUESS that one of the @-letters are actually supposed to be %40, but I won't. It could also guess that @ was accidentally a '2' with alt-gr pressed when using a nordic keyboard layout. Guessing here is crazy.

> Many tools do in this case, Firefox is one of them.

So what if you had that @ in your password and not in your user name?

> And anyway, trying to connect to email.com@server.com is probably the worst 
> thing it can do.

I understand that you're saying that as a git user and someone who's not into curl and libcurl details, but I'm in the opposite corner mostly and I claim that isn't at all such a bad outcome from that input. curl has that approach through-out its entire URL parser. It gets what it needs and then uses the rest unparsed. That way it is very liberal in what it accepts and it doesn't reject bad URLs as long as it only can extract the parts it needs.

If curl had a strict parser it would of course bluntly reject that URL at once.

> At least, it could warn about two @ in the URL and say it can't handle it

It could, sure. But curl has no such strict parser so it accepts all sorts of various violations.

I don't think this is the proper place to discuss what curl (or libcurl) should or shouldn't do with given URLs - but you're most welcome to bring your ideas and patches to the curl project and we can debate their virtues over there.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se