Tag Archives: bug

Price match guarantee with a bug @Hotels.com

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I just came across this website (Hotels.com), so went ahead and started playing around the website. I really liked the interface, though a little cluttered homepage, it gave a complete overview of the offers on the website. I saw the “Price Match Guarantee“, so went ahead to check their rates for the hotel I stayed in Puducherry (Ginger Hotel). I was shocked to see the results for Jayaram Hotel which was Rs. 1 lakh per night:

Hotel Jayaram @Hotels.com

Hotel Jayaram @Hotels.com

Before I could call it a bug with the site, I jumped on travelguru.com and checked their rates. It was less than Rs 1200 per night for the same hotel and same dates. I am left wondering if I can somehow get the difference in the amount per night for the hotel I didn’t book 😉

Facebook: Bug with URL encoding

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Today, while I was working on the URL encoding for the recently released Facebook-style Links module, I realized a bug with Link Attachments feature on Facebook. Before I explain, let us reproduce it:

Try to attach the following link on Facebook: http://google.com/search?q=blenders%26pride. This URL actually queries Google for ‘blenders&pride’. Facebook converts/encodes the above URL to http://google.com/search?q=blenders&pride which is not the same as above and queries Google for just ‘blenders’.

So, why Facebook does this? Probably Facebook tries to encode the URL to remove the characters which are not allowed by RFC 3986 and replaces them with their percent encoding. But there are certain characters which should not be encoded, such as ‘/’, ‘?’, ‘#’, ‘@’ which are the reserved characters and used as delimiters in the URL. So, it decodes these characters and converts their encoding to the original character which gives rise to the problem. Let us see an example:
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