Question

Are urls of the form http://asdf.com/something.do?param1=true?param2=false valid?

I don’t think the second ? is allowed in valid urls and that it should instead be an ampersand (&), but I’m unable to find anything about this in the http 1.1 rfc. Any ideas?

Answer 1

It is not valid to use ? again. ? should indicate the start of the parameter list. & should separate parameters.

From RFC 3986:

URI = scheme ':' hier-part [ '?' query ] [ '#' fragment ] 

From RFC 1738 :

An HTTP URL takes the form:

http:// <host> : <port> / <path> ? <searchpart> 

where <host> and <port> are as described in Section 3.1. If :<port> is omitted, the port defaults to 80. No user name or password is allowed. <path> is an HTTP selector, and <searchpart> is a query string. The <path> is optional, as is the <searchpart> and its preceding ‘?’. If neither <path> nor <searchpart> is present, the ‘/’ may also be omitted.

Within the <path> and <searchpart> components, ‘/’, ‘;’, ‘?’ are reserved. The ‘/’ character may be used within HTTP to designate a hierarchical structure.

The search part/query part is described here.