Public Mindfbsl http://publicmind.in/blog Simple and Sophisticated Fri, 27 May 2011 08:28:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Facebook: Bug with URL encoding http://publicmind.in/blog/facebook-bug-with-url-encoding/ http://publicmind.in/blog/facebook-bug-with-url-encoding/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:33:48 +0000 Nitin http://publicmind.in/blog/?p=548 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:

‘http://google.com/search?q= %2B‘ is first encoded to replace unwanted character with their percent encoding, turns into ‘http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3D%20%2B’. (Note: I assume that already encoded characters are not encoded again in order to reproduce the bug, i.e.%2B does not gets converted to %252B). Then, the reserved characters (/,:,?,=,@,+) must be decoded again, therefore it gets converted to ‘http://google.com/search?q=%20+‘ which as we see is not the same. It ideally should have been ‘http://google.com/search?q=%20%2B’.

I have already reported it in the bugs on Facebook. I will like to hear your views on URL encoding. Do you consider this as bug? Why does such URLs are not properly formatted at source making lives of developers difficult? Why does URLs with spaces and other disallowed characters exists?

Enjoy.

Related Resources:

]]> http://publicmind.in/blog/facebook-bug-with-url-encoding/feed/ 5 Drupal: Facebook-style Links http://publicmind.in/blog/drupal-facebook-link/ http://publicmind.in/blog/drupal-facebook-link/#comments Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:43:52 +0000 Nitin http://publicmind.in/blog/?p=475 Facebook-style Links (FBSL) provides the ability for users to attach and submit links along with their Facebook-style Statuses. Combined with Facebook-style Statuses (FBSS), the FBSL module provides an attach link form that loads via AHAH. Users can then attach a link with an (optional) thumbnail, title and description to their status. In the nutshell, it imitates the link attachment feature on Facebook.

screenshot-londonfuse

Screenshot of FBSL on LondonFuse.ca



FBSL also provides token support for modules such as Activity 2.x. The themed image, title, description and status among other tokens are offered. The FBSS statuses which have a attached link, have their own separate Activity Publisher Templates.

FBSL is designed to be used quite intuitively, this screenshot shows the FBSL status form as themed by Thomas Cermak on LondonFuse.

screenshot-facebook-link

FBSL status update form

FBSL can be used out of the box, though you can customize it from the settings page. All other information (installation, usage, and changelog) can be found inside the packaged module which is available for download here.

This module has been sponsored by Thomas Cermak of LondonFuse.

Resources:

Note: Feature and Support requests should be made through the Facebook-style Links Forum. I may not be able to answer them here.

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