RE: [dav-dev] Problem with OfficeXP and Accented characters

Greg,

what you describe is a scenario where

- the server preserves whatever octet sequence was used in a URL
- the clients are consistent in what they send/expect

However, thinks are more complicated.

- In moddav (correct me if I'm wrong), people may be creating resources by
directly accessing the filesystem. If, for instance, I create a filename
containing "A umlaut", and the filesystem's filename encoding is ISO-8859-1,
I'll have the octet %c4 in the name. Returning %c4 in the PROPFIND response
in the general case will not work (because the client doesn't know about URL
character encodings, so it must use what the RFCs say, and that is UTF-8).

- Broken clients may use request/destination URIs which are not encoded in
UTF-8 (this may apply to older versions of Microsoft clients). So you
basically have the choice of failing the request if the octet stream doesn't
UTF-8-decode, or you can try to workaround the problem by making assumptions
about what the encoding in the request may have been.

As this issue is coming up every few weeks and as almost every server /
client I've seen in the last few months has some bug in this regard, it
should certainly clarified in the RFC2518 revision.

Julian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org
> [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Greg Stein
> Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2002 3:53 AM
> To: Julian Reschke
> Cc: Peter Gillis; dav-dev@lyra.org; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org;
> I20568n@mindshare.intraspect.com
> Subject: Re: [dav-dev] Problem with OfficeXP and Accented characters
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 09:31:37PM +0100, Julian Reschke wrote:
> >...
> > > From: dav-dev-admin@lyra.org
> [mailto:dav-dev-admin@lyra.org]On Behalf Of
> > > Peter Gillis
> > > Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 8:46 PM
> >...
> > > I am having a problem with Microsoft Web Folders after the
> client installs
> > > Office XP on their machine and file names with accented characters are
> > > involved.  Our server has been working in the past with earlier
> > > implementations of Web Folders without a problem, however,
> when the client
> > > machine is upgraded to Office XP, a document that was accessible
> > > previously
> > > is now not found.  I have tracked the problem down to the
> fact that Web
> > > Folders is encoding the URI value a second time before sending
> > > the request,
> > > which then causes it not to be found on our server.  For example:
> > >
> > > In the folder listing we send back the following property:
> > >
> > > <href>/dav/webdav/%E8%E2temp%C9.xls</href>
> >
> > Isn't this wrong in the first place? My understanding is that you should
> > send URL-encoded UTF-8.
>
> Nope.
>
> The filename is in an "original character set". That is then encoded into
> octets for the URL. That transformation is not specified
> anywhere. Ideally,
> it is "original -> UTF-8", but nobody says it must be. In fact, I
> would say
> it should match whatever encoding was used for the Request-URI
> (but that is
> not specified/defined in the request, so you're out of luck again).
>
> Once you have octets, then you perform the URL-escaping (using '%xx').
>
> After that, you need to transform the URL into the character set of the
> response body. That is usually UTF-8, but it is possible to have
> the XML in
> a different character set (provided it is specified on the Content-Type
> response header).
>
> Finally, you must XML-escape the UTF-8 characters of the URL you're
> inserting (e.g. translate '&' to '&amp;') so that you can embed the UTF-8
> content into the XML response.
>
>
> A long time ago, I captured this as a start of a technical FAQ. See:
>     http://www.webdav.org/other/techfaq.html
>
> Specifically, the second section.
>
> Cheers,
> -g
>
> --
> Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
>

Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2002 05:39:06 UTC