Re: [ietf-types] The application/www-form-urlencoded format

["Stephen D. Williams" <[e-mail]>]

  On 9/26/10 1:32 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * Stephen D. Williams wrote:
>>   On 9/26/10 2:22 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>> On Sat, 25 Sep 2010 23:14:39 +0200, Bjoern Hoehrmann<[e-mail]>  wrote:
>>>>    http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hoehrmann-urlencoded -- the draft de-
>>>> scribes the application/www-form-urlencoded format, a variant of the
>>>> application/x-www-form-urlencoded format first described in RFC 1866.
>> What the character encoding errors are at the end of section 5 needs to
>> be explained, at least for 2 cases.
> I believe the first encodes a pair of surrogate code points, the second
> a character beyond U+10FFFF, the first is an overlong sequence, then it
> is a truncated sequence, and finally you have an illegal starter with
> ASCII after it. They are all prohibited by the definition of UTF-8. I do
> not think that kind of technical detail would be well-placed there, but
> I could rephrase so it refers to UTF-8 directly instead of calling it
> "character encoding errors" though that's the same thing here.

In real life, say in Java, processing such data would throw an exception in the String library decoding methods.  That's fine, 
however it is not really about the www-form-urlencoded level format/parsing, but the next level down, UTF-8.  When I read that 
section, I expected to see data malformed at that syntax level: "%HA%##", etc.  You can simply say that data that is not valid UTF-8 
produces undefined results (i.e. exceptions, etc.).  That's true of the format itself.

Stephen