I cannot find documentation anywhere regarding whether the following URL that has a query string is valid.
http://www.example.com/webapp&someKey=someValue
I know that ? starts a list of key-value pairs separated by &.
Is the ? required?
Add a comment
|
1 Answer
? appears to be required for the trailing part to be called query.
Query string is defined in RFC 3986. Section 3.3 Path says:
The path component contains data, usually organized in hierarchical form, that, along with data in the non-hierarchical query component (Section 3.4), serves to identify a resource within the scope of the URI's scheme and naming authority (if any). The path is terminated by the first question mark ("?") or number sign ("#") character, or by the end of the URI.
Section 3.4 defines query:
The query component contains non-hierarchical data that, along with data in the path component (Section 3.3), serves to identify a resource within the scope of the URI's scheme and naming authority (if any). The query component is indicated by the first question mark ("?") character and terminated by a number sign ("#") character or by the end of the URI.
RFC 1738 for URL has a section for HTTP URL scheme. It says in section 3.3 that:
An HTTP URL takes the form:
http://<host>:<port>/<path>?<searchpart>
where and are as described in Section 3.1. If : is omitted, the port defaults to 80. No user name or password is allowed. is an HTTP selector, and is a query string. The is optional, as is the and its preceding "?". If neither nor is present, the "/" may also be omitted.
Within the and components, "/", ";", "?" are reserved. The "/" character may be used within HTTP to designate a hierarchical structure.
You can use tricks to take the URI as you mention and then split it as if it was a query string. Frameworks like Laravel, Django etc. allow you to handle routes in a query string like manner. There's more to it than what I say; I was just giving an example about Frameworks' handling of URIs.
Look at this example from Laravel documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/routing#required-parameters. It shows how Laravel takes a route like https://site/posts/1/comments/3 and handles the post id 1 and comment id 3 through a function.
Route::get('posts/{post}/comments/{comment}', function ($postId, $commentId) {
//
});
You can, perhaps, handle routes like http://site/webapp/somekey/somevalue.
