Re: utf8 urls

[Geoffrey Young <suppressed>]

John ORourke wrote:
> Eli Shemer wrote:
> > For some reason the following test doesn’t print anything out to the 
> > screen
> >
> > Do I need to change something in the apache configuration, or 
> > mod_perl’s ?
> >
> >  
> >
> > /articles_read.pl?id=חוזרת
> >
> >  
> >
> > ## get http parameters
> >
> > $r = shift;
> >
> > $apr = Apache2::Request->new($r);
> >
> > print  $apr->param('id');
>
> I'm not sure why you get nothing, but I can tell you strings read from 
> Apache objects come through as octets and need to be decoded before 
> use.  We're using UTF-8 chars in URLs but I've never used one in a GET 
> request parameter.

I can't say why it doesn't work, but I'm surprised it would in either 
case - the only characters explicitly allowed in a uri are us-ascii. 
from rfc2396:

  2.4. Escape Sequences

   Data must be escaped if it does not have a representation using an
   unreserved character; this includes data that does not correspond to
   a printable character of the US-ASCII coded character set, or that
   corresponds to any US-ASCII character that is disallowed, as
   explained below.

I bit of googling turned up this cpan module:

  http://search.cpan.org/dist/URI-Find-UTF8/lib/URI/Find/UTF8.pm

where the docs point to a ja.wikipedia.org page.  for me (firefox 2.0) 
clicking on the "original" uri (the one with the japanese characters) 
opens up a uri with the uri-escaped character sequence.  it's like magic ;)

anyway, my point wasn't to get into some huge debate on whether people 
are (successfully) using utf-8 characters in uris, etc.  rather, it is 
that mod_perl is (mostly) merely a wrapper around apache, and if 
something is improper wrt an official rfc apache generally dismisses it 
rather than bending to a behavior which people may be using anyway.

so, if it works, great.  if not, try making your urls conform to 2396 
and see if you have better results.

--Geoff