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Asked: 2026-06-11T12:47:20+00:00

I am building an HTML5 single page app, and I want to allow the

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I am building an HTML5 single page app, and I want to allow the user to keep the current application state for later use. I want to achieve this by creating a link URL to my page, with a specially crafted query part. When called again, with the URL, the application would parse the query part and recreate the stored state.

Now, some part of the state is a list, whose items are numerical values and an associated text. The floating-point numerical values, as well as the text is not required to be unique.

Like this:

4.54  first
12.1  another
12.1  more
34    more

My intent is to create an URL like so:

www.myappdomain.com/SinglePage.html?4.54=first&12.1=another&12.1=more&34=more

Is this a legal URL? Given proper encoding of the text, will this work in the wild?

I have read What Every Developer Should Know About URLs by Alan Skorkin, which I can generally recommend about URLs and this Answer about URL character usage.

To me, doing it that way seems legal but I still feel a little uncomfortable, since I have not found information about the possibly non-unique keys I might have and about numbers as keys in query parts in general.

Edit: I’ve brought it to work, see below (tell me if link ever breaks):
http://quir.li/player.html?media=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D0VqTwnAuHws&title=What%20makes%20you%20beautiful&artist=The%20piano%20guys%20covering%20One%20Republic&album=Youtube&6.49=Intro&30.12=Knocking%20part&46.02=Real%20playing&51.5=Piano%20forte&93.32=Stringified&123.35=Vocals&139.38=Key%20cover%20jam&150.16=Good%20morning%20sky&173.96=Final%20chord

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This is a legal URL by the URI specification — https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986. However, whether this will work in the wild is a different issue since the specification only defines the generic syntax of URIs.

    Since there is no specification on what should be done for duplicate keys in the query part (see Authoritative position of duplicate HTTP GET query keys) different software frameworks will treat such URIs differently. However, most frameworks will correctly detect duplicate keys as multiple values with the same key and group such values into a single array/list of values for the given key (rather than using the last value with the given key and discarding all the previous values for that key). Using numbers as keys is also OK since keys are parsed as text strings. In short: you should be safe.

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