From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre@floodgap.com>
Message-Id: <200510262356.QAA15178@floodgap.com>
Subject: [gopher] Re: Illegal or simply strange characters in gophermap
In-Reply-To: <435FEEEC.4080901@route-add.net> from Alessandro Selli at "Oct
 26, 5 11:02:36 pm"
To: gopher@complete.org
Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 16:56:08 -0700 (PDT)
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>   Well, I found out I cannot access files whose name contains a
> question mark, if i try I get this error message (bucktooth-0.1pr6):
> 
> 0'/Utenti/Alessandro/Usenet/it.comp.os.linux.sys/Re: Server Alpha,
> distro ' doesn't exist!		error.host	1
> .
> 
>   The filename is: "Re: Server Alpha, distro ?" and the corresponding
> gophermap line is:
> 
> 0Re: Server Alpha, distro ?     Re: Server Alpha, distro ?
> 
> This is a nuisance considering the many subject: lines that are
> encoded in RFC-1522 MIME format, such as:
> 
> =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re=3A_=5BOT=5D_Linux_kernel_FALLATO=3A_?=
> 
>   Is this the right way a Gopher server is supposed to handle such
> filenames?

Probably not (John can say how pygopherd does it), but this is on purpose.
I needed a character to delimit arguments to a script from the script name
itself, and not every client was properly sending a tab between the two. For
this reason, I adopted the "?" character as an alternate delimeter since it
would be immediately understood by people who have also worked with CGIs, and
should be comparatively rare. The bonus is that you can embed arguments in
selectors this way.

So this is not (likely to be) spec, just a lesser of alternate evils.

That said, it seems odd you would organize your files that way -- why not by
message-ID or article number?

>   I'm considering editing the script to convert all question marks
> into something else; are there any more characters that I should
> catch before creating the files and updating the gophermap?

No, the question mark is the only one that's salient (other than tab, of
course).

Again, this is undoubtedly different for other servers.
-- 
---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
 Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser@floodgap.com
-- Test-tube babies shouldn't throw stones. -----------------------------------