Re: When and why should I escape a path string?

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 11:10 +0100, Matthias Kaeppler wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just encountered a bug in my program, where I would try to create a 
> Gnome::Vfs::Uri from an escaped path (the directory in question was the 
> 'lost+found' directory which is found on ext3 partitions and which was 
> converted by gnome-vfs to 'lost%2Bfound'). I was getting exceptions 
> thrown at me when trying to create an URI from this string ("file does 
> not exist").
> 
> After unescaping the string, creating an URI from it worked. So when and 
> why am I supposed to use escaped paths? Obviously, gnome-vfs somewhere 
> internally already escaped the path, so it should be able to deal with 
> them. But then, why does creating an URI from an escaped path fail? ^^

It varies a bit. For instance gnome_vfs_uri_extract_short_name gets the
unescaped file name, while gnome_vfs_uri_extract_short_path_name gives
you the escaped version. You have to take care for each call that takes
a filename to make sure you have the right form, which should be
specified in the docs.

However, whenever you're passing full URIs they *must* be escaped, as
otherwise they are not valid uris. The exception of course are helper
functions like gnome_vfs_make_uri_from_input() that are made to convert
invalid user-specified uris into real uris.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an all-American day-dreaming inventor with a winning smile and a way with 
the ladies. She's a strong-willed French-Canadian opera singer who hides her 
beauty behind a pair of thick-framed spectacles. They fight crime!