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news and thoughts on and around the development of the iCite net
by Jay Fienberg

Your RSS readers may be improperly escaping URLs with query strings

posted: Mar 2, 2004 12:52:55 AM

I was going through my site logs recently and noticed that some RSS readers were double or triple escaping my full-content RSS URLs, which have & characters in them (as part of query strings). It is possible this is the result of multiple aggregations or cuts and pastes from one RSS reader to another, but it suggests that some RSS readers might be escaping RSS URLs (improperly).

If you are reading this blog via one of the strangely / extra escaped URLs, you are probably getting my brief content entries rather than the full content. Here are some example messed URLs from my log (escaped again for proper display here):

"GET /blog/?flavor=rss2&amp;amp;smm=y HTTP/1.0" 200 11482 "http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregator" "Radio UserLand/8.0.8 (WinNT)"

"GET /blog/?flavor=rss2&amp;smm=y HTTP/1.0" 200 11482 "http://radio.userland.com/newsAggregator" "Radio UserLand/8.0.9b2 (MacOS)

"GET /blog/?flavor=rdf&&&&smm=y HTTP/1.1" 200 18012 "-" "Java/1.4.2_03"

"GET /blog/?flavor=rss2&amp;amp;smm=y HTTP/1.1" 200 3116 "-" "Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 1 subscriber)

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also available as: rss · rss2 · rdf · atom

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