[xmonad] Re: [patch] Fix URI escaping in X.A.Search

[Gwern Branwen]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 12:25 PM, Khudyakov Alexey
<alexey.skladnoy at gmail.com> wrote:
> В сообщении от 29 апреля 2010 19:47:26 вы написали:
>> On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 7:29 AM, Khudyakov Alexey
>>
>> <alexey.skladnoy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > В сообщении от 24 апреля 2010 00:57:29 вы написали:
>> >> Hello
>> >>
>> >> This patch fix URI escaping in X.A.Search. Non ASCII characters were not
>> >> escaped. This patch modify escape function so it encodes as UTF8 and
>> >>  escapes all non-ASCII characters.
>> >>
>> >> This is also a workaroud for bug in System.Process which doesn't
>> >> properly encode strings and just truncate Chars to 1 byte.
>> >
>> > Ping?
>>
>> I looked at it earlier, and I wasn't so sure that this is entirely
>> right. For example, in 'isAscii c && isAlphaNum c = [c]', isn't
>> isAscii redundant? I thought all AlphaNum were ASCII.
>>
> No. It's necessary.
>
>> Prelude Data.Char> isAlphaNum 'ы'
> True
>
>> As well as that, I'm not confident about the use of encodeString. We
>> had a long discussion about modify the 'spawn' functions to UTF-8
>> encode stuff, and the upshot was that it seemed like a bad idea? See
>> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2009-January/thread.html#7012
>>
> In this particular case it's right thing to do. According to RFC3986[1] all
> URLs should be first encoded in UTF-8 and then percent encoded. So xmonad just
> emits valid URL.
>
> Quote from RFC3986:
>   Non-ASCII
>   characters must first be encoded according to UTF-8 [STD63], and then
>   each octet of the corresponding UTF-8 sequence must be percent-
>   encoded to be represented as URI characters
>
> [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986

Hm. Alright then; I'll apply a patch if you'll amend-record it to remove this:

-search browser site query = safeSpawn browser [site query]
+search browser site query = do
+  safeSpawn browser [site query]

Unnecessary 'do' is bad, and someone would have to clean it up with
hlint eventually.

-- 
gwern