[xml] Universally replacing space with %20 before calling xmlParseURI - bad?

["Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones redhat com>]

As far as I can tell xmlParseURI always fails if the input URI
contains a space in the path part of the URI.

Virt-v2v uses URIs for all kinds of things including referencing
remote virtual machines, eg:

  ssh://root esxi example com/vmfs/volumes/datacenter/my guest/my guest.vmx

Virtual machine names often contain spaces.  You have to tell people
to replace spaces with ‘%20’s, and that can be awkward in the sort of
shell-scripting places where virt-v2v is often used, and it's a
usability problem too.

One suggestion is that we wrap all calls to xmlParseURI with a wrapper
that simply replaces spaces with ‘%20’s (without making any attempt to
understand the URI, just blind replacement).

Is this going to be a bad thing?

Note that I don't care if it doesn't conform to some RFC.  I'm much
more worried that we'll introduce a security bug by doing this or that
there's some unanticipated pitfall.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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