[pmwiki-users] Incorrect URL with ?action=something

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 12:00:12AM +0200, Hochstrasser Benedikt wrote:
> I am currently exploring pmwiki2-beta32 on BRS WebWeaver (testing) or
> Apache/mini_httpd (productive).
>  
> I noticed that the 'action' argument is always attached to the url via
> "?action=something", regardless whether PATH_INFO was used or not, eg.
> http://localhost/pmwiki-2.0.beta32/pmwiki.php?n=Main.SideBar?action=edit
> 
> This will fail miserably because [at least] BRS will happily report that
> the QUERY_STRING was "n=Main.SideBar", ie it simply chops off the
> trailing
> 2nd argument. (I don't know what the RFCs say about how-to-treat cgi
> urls with two question marks)

The RFCs say it's perfectly legal.  From RFC 3986 [1], section 3.4:

    ... The query component is indicated by the 
    first question mark ("?") character and terminated by a 
    number sign ("#") character or by the end of the URI.

        query       = *( pchar / "/" / "?" )

    The characters slash ("/") and question mark ("?") may represent 
    data within the query component. ...

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt

Of course, I did it this way so that PmWiki (and authors) don't have
to decide whether to use '&' or '?' to add a query component to
the string -- they can always use '?' and PmWiki knows how to deal
with the result.  Of course, if the webserver is broken, well...

Now then, I did check RFC 2396 (the predecessor to RFC 3986), and 
although it says there that '?' is reserved within a query component 
there were other items mentioned in that document that led me to
believe that an unencoded '?' is acceptable in the query string.

Pm