Question

We’re deploying the same web application multiple times on the same weblogic domain, for multiple test environments.

Even though we use different servers and ports, we find it convenient to use different names to easily identify the deployed application. So far, we’ve put the environment name in the application name, between brackets, like this:

Applic[DEV]
Applic[SIT1]
Applic[SIT2]

Until today, it worked like a charm. But now we’re facing an issue when redeploying an application. I’m not sure what we could have changed that causes this problem.

The exception we get is:

java.net.URISyntaxException: Illegal character in path at index 65: file:/APPLICdev1/applicDomain/servers/SIT2/tmp/_WL_user/ApplicWeb[Sit2]/gp8nae/war/WEB-INF/lib/applicCommons-RELEASE.jar

According to the W3C (here) the character in question “[” is supposed to be a valid character, reserved but valid. We solved the issue by removing the brackets but I’m curious to understand the cause of this problem.

Thanks

Answer 1

As stated in RFC3986, [ and ] are reserved characters which are valid only in IPv6 address representation:

3.2.2. Host
…
A host identified by an Internet Protocol literal address,
version 6 [RFC3513] or later, is
distinguished by enclosing the IP
literal within square brackets (“[”
and “]”). This is the only place
where square bracket characters are
allowed in the URI syntax.

So, in other places they should be escaped.

However, it doesn’t explain behaviour of Weblogic regarding file names.
Perhaps it’s a bug caused by using new URI(...) instead of new File(...).toURI() for creating file:/ URIs.