Can angle brackets be used in a URL?

[fboulnois]

I checked the relevant RFCs but maybe I missed if this was legitimate or not. I would expect URLs which contain angle brackets <> to cause a parse error.

• In RFC1738, angle brackets are treated as unsafe and "must always be encoded within a URL" (section 2.2)
• In RFC2396, URIs exclude angle brackets specifically (section 2.4.3)
• In RFC3986, the allowed character set for the various URI components doesn't include angle brackets (sections 2 and 3), and in Appendix C, it is recommended that "using <> angle brackets around each URI is especially recommended as a delimiting style for a reference that contains embedded whitespace.", which suggests to me that angle brackets are explicitly excluded from the URI character set

Short example code:

extern crate url;
use url::Url;
fn main() {
    let s = "http://www.exam<ple.com";
    match Url::parse(s) {
        Ok(u) => println!("success: {}", u),
        Err(e) => panic!("failure: {}", e)
    }
}

output: success: http://www.exam<ple.com/

For what it's worth, in Firefox, new URL("http://exam<ple.com/") returns TypeError: http://exam<ple.com/ is not a valid URL.

[SimonSapin]

This library implements the WHATWG URL Standard, not any IETF RFC. That said, it’s quite possible that the spec has changed and this implementation hasn’t caught up yet: #163, #290.

Also note that the normative requirement for a tool (or human) that produces an URL string may be different from those for a different tool that parses such a string.

[fboulnois]

This library implements the WHATWG URL Standard, not any IETF RFC. That said, it’s quite possible that the spec has changed and this implementation hasn’t caught up yet: #163, #290.

Also note that the normative requirement for a tool (or human) that produces an URL string may be different from those for a different tool that parses such a string.

That makes sense, thanks. whatwg-url validates http://www.exam<ple.com/ successfully too.