↩ in URLs

Posted on October 19, 2007 by Steven Fisher

Background information: Daring Fireball linked to my previous article about the missing ↩ glyph in the iPhone and iPod touch. Thankfully, mx gave me a heads up1, and I switched a few settings on my site to better deal with the extra attention.2

Watching the log, though, I find one thing interesting:

[19/Oct/2007:12:12:37 -0700] "GET /wp-content/themes/pyilewptheme/iphone.css HTTP/1.1" 200 355 "http://pyile.com/2007/10/i-want-my-%e2%86%a9/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"

[19/Oct/2007:12:12:37 -0700] "GET /wp-content/themes/pyilewptheme/iphone.css HTTP/1.1" 200 354 "http://pyile.com/2007/10/i-want-my-%E2%86%A9/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070718 Firefox/2.0.0.5"

It looks like Safari and Firefox encode the ↩ differently in URLs. I’m not sure which, if either, is “wrong3,” but I found this interesting. When I was testing the ↩ in the URL, I only checked that it worked in Firefox and Safari. I didn’t think to check that they requested it the same way. I imagine Apache is doing the conversion here, but would other web servers do it as well?

  1. Actually, it was Allen, but his email had a brief stay in purgatory. [↩]
  2. It looks like the particular Dreamhost server I’m on is being slammed, and from the load, it definitely isn’t just this that’s doing it. Although I can’t imagine I’m helping much. [↩]
  3. I’m sure it’s in the HTTP spec, but I can’t be bothered looking it up right now. [↩]
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2 Responses to ↩ in URLs

  1. Nima says:
    October 19, 2007 at 1:44 pm

    Thanks for the link, Steven.

    Just to add, when I check my server logs traffic coming in from your site has is from “http://pyile.com/2007/10/i-want-my-%e2%86%a9/” as well, but Mint gives it as “http://pyile.com/2007/10/i-want-my-%u21A9/”. The former resolves properly to your site, the later does not. Weird.

    You’re undoubtedly smarter than me, so I leave it to you to explain.

  2. Steven Fisher says:
    October 19, 2007 at 1:53 pm

    Not me!

    I’m pretty sure “my” server is trying to handle that request, but just can’t figure it out. If I had to guess, I’d say Apache is case insensitive for unicode characters, but doesn’t recognize the unicode u21A9 notation. Seems like a bug to me, or at least a missing feature. (Edit: u21A9 is definitely a valid way to describe that arrow!)

    And you’re welcome! Thanks for writing up that article… I was quite confused about what I was seeing until I read it. Now I’m just slightly dismayed. :)