[whatwg] URL: javascript URLs

Boris Zbarsky bzbarsky at MIT.EDU
Fri Sep 28 11:04:58 PDT 2012


On 9/28/12 1:30 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> Well that is interesting. So the document encoding is not solely a
> query component affair?

At least not for Gecko, no.

> Does this only apply to javascript URLs? I
> cannot get this to work for data URLs.

Looks like there's some javascript:-specific code here, yes.  In 
particular, when the URI object is being created for javascript: and the 
document encoding is not UTF-8, it looks like Gecko will do the following:

1)  Take the given string (which by this point is a byte array,
     actually; if it started off as Unicode it got converted to UTF-8
     to produce this byte array).
2)  Unescape non-ascii escapes (that is, escapes whose hex value is not
     in the ASCII range).
3)  If the result is not valid UTF-8 bytes and the document encoding
     is some variant of utf-16, or is utf-7, or is
     x-imap4-modified-utf7 (whatever that is), just byte-inflate to
     Unicode.  There's a comment here about encodings that are not
     ASCII supersets.
4)  Otherwise, if the byte array looks like valid UTF-8, convert
     from UTF-8 to Unicode.
5)  Otherwise, convert to Unicode using the document
     encoding.
4)  Convert the resulting Unicode string to UTF-8.
5)  Escape non-ASCII bytes.

I have no idea how much of this is needed in practice...

-Boris




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