Req #52923 [Com]: parse_url corrupts some UTF-8 strings

Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52923&edit=1 ID: 52923 Comment by: bugsphpnet at lumental dot com Reported by: masteram at gmail dot com Summary: parse_url corrupts some UTF-8 strings Status: Open Type: Feature/Change Request Package: URL related Operating System: MS Windows XP PHP Version: 5.3.3 Block user comment: N Private report: N New Comment: On our Debian 4.3.2-1.1 server, changing the locale from LANG=en_US to LANG=en_US.UTF-8 seems to have fixed this problem. In my opinion, parse_url() should treat all extended characters (octets 80-FF) as opaque characters and copy them as-is without modification. Then, the function will work fine for both utf-8 and iso-8859-1 strings. The behaviour of parse_url() should not depend on the LANG setting. In my opinion, this function is buggy. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-12-08 22:15:23] dextercowley at gmail dot com This issue seems to be platform dependent. For example, on Windows Vista with PHP 5.3.1, parse_url('http://mydomain.com/path/道') returns $array['path'] = "/path/". However, on a MAC, it works correctly and returns "/path/道". We can work around it by uuencoding each part of the array and then decoding the various legal URL characters ("/", ":", "&", and so on) before running parse_url, then decoding the path. However, a parse_url_utf8 function would be very convenient and probably faster. Thanks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-09-26 09:46:39] cataphract@php.net The problem is that nothing guarantees a percent-encoded URL should be interpreted as containing UTF-8 data or that an (invalid) URL containing non-encoded unreserved characters should be converted to UTF-8 before being percent-encoded. In fact, while most browsers will use UTF-8 to build URLs entered in the address bar, in case of HTML anchors in HTML pages, they will prefer to use the encoding of the page instead if it's also an ASCII superset. That said, the corruption you describe seems uncalled for. In fact, I am unable to reproduce it. This is the value of $url I get in the end: string(32) "/he/פרויקטים/ByYear.html" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-09-25 16:22:19] masteram at gmail dot com I tend to agree with Pajoye. Although RFC-3986 calls for the use of percent-encoding for URLs, I believe that it also mentions the IDN format (and the way things look today, there is a host of websites that use UTF-8 encoding, which benefits the readability of internationalized urls). I admit not being an expert in URL encoding, but it seems to me that corrupting a string, even if it does not meet the current standards, is a bad habit. In addition, utf-8 encoded URLs seem to be quite common on reality. Take the international versions of Wikipedia as an example. If I'm wrong about that, I would be more than happy to know it. I am not sure that the encode-analyze-merge-decode procedure is really the best choice. Perhaps the streamlined alternative should be considered. It sure wouldn't hurt. I, for one, am currently using 'ASCII-only' URLs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-09-25 14:34:34] pajoye@php.net It is not a bogus request. The idea would also to get the decoded (to UTF-8) URL elements as result. It is also a good complement to IDN support ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2010-09-25 14:19:40] cataphract@php.net I'd say this request/bug is bogus because such URL is not valid according to RFC 3986. He should first percent-encode all the characters that are unreserved (perhaps after doing some unicode normalization) and only then parse the URL. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52923 -- Edit this bug report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52923&edit=1