3 ms·

My recollection of the "old days" may be a bit hazy, but I think comma delimited parameters were a work around for frameworks that did not support multiple valu

My recollection of the "old days" may be a bit hazy, but I think comma delimited parameters were a work around for frameworks that did not support multiple values (or users not knowing how to handle it) Example of a "correct" url ?value=A&value=B&value=C Complete frameworks would have a method that returned the values as a list. Some like PHP required ugly work arounds where you had to name the parameter using the array syntax: value[]=A&value[]=B&value[]=C Even if the framework supported multi-values, many preferred the shorter version: value=A,B,C and split the values in code instead

rvnx 3y ago
value[]=A&value[]=B&value[]=C is an idea that apparently came out of PHP in ~2000, not of standards. So, people who learnt programming in 2000, until ~2010 it's quite normal to see the commas as delimiter of multiple parameters.
- recursive 3y ago
  As far as I know, the "standard" way is value=A&value=B&value=C. This is what comes out of a plain form submission.
simonw 3y ago
Django actually has a special mechanism for dealing with ?value=&A&value=B values = request.GET.getlist("value") # values is now ["A", "B"] We built it that way because we had seen the weird bugs that cropped up with the PHP solution, where passing ?q[]=x to a PHP application that expected ?q=x could result in an array passed to code that expected a string.
AlienRobot 3y ago
I don't know if it's something from the old days or not, but iirc URLs have a semicolon separator (;) that would go before the ?. I have never seen it being used. I'm betting it's even less support than commas!
- toast0 3y ago
  My understanding is you can use ; instead of both ? And & Handy if anything actually supported it, because then you could plop parameters on the end of urls without looking to see if there was already a ? I'm sure it's used somewhere, but I can only remember it being used by Yahoo Link Tracking ;_ylt=y64encodedgunk
- recursive 3y ago
  Semicolon (;) has no special meaning in a URL. You can ascribe it a meaning in your particular routing, but the spec has nothing to say about it. https://url.spec.whatwg.org/ https://url.spec.whatwg.org/
  - uranusjr 3y ago
    In the OG RFC 2396, each _path segment_ can specify parameters similar to query parameters, but using a semicolon to separate them to the main segment value instead of question mark. This has effects e.g. when calculating relative URLs. This is now obsolete, but many URL-parsing libraries have an API for that for compatibility.
felixfbecker 3y ago
The issue is that commas are technically not allowed in the search params without being percent encoded

rvnx 3y ago

value[]=A&value[]=B&value[]=C is an idea that apparently came out of PHP in ~2000, not of standards. So, people who learnt programming in 2000, until ~2010 it's quite normal to see the commas as delimiter of multiple parameters.

recursive 3y ago
As far as I know, the "standard" way is value=A&value=B&value=C. This is what comes out of a plain form submission.

simonw 3y ago

Django actually has a special mechanism for dealing with ?value=&A&value=B values = request.GET.getlist("value") # values is now ["A", "B"] We built it that way because we had seen the weird bugs that cropped up with the PHP solution, where passing ?q[]=x to a PHP application that expected ?q=x could result in an array passed to code that expected a string.

AlienRobot 3y ago

I don't know if it's something from the old days or not, but iirc URLs have a semicolon separator (;) that would go before the ?. I have never seen it being used. I'm betting it's even less support than commas!

toast0 3y ago
My understanding is you can use ; instead of both ? And & Handy if anything actually supported it, because then you could plop parameters on the end of urls without looking to see if there was already a ? I'm sure it's used somewhere, but I can only remember it being used by Yahoo Link Tracking ;_ylt=y64encodedgunk
recursive 3y ago
Semicolon (;) has no special meaning in a URL. You can ascribe it a meaning in your particular routing, but the spec has nothing to say about it. https://url.spec.whatwg.org/ https://url.spec.whatwg.org/
- uranusjr 3y ago
  In the OG RFC 2396, each _path segment_ can specify parameters similar to query parameters, but using a semicolon to separate them to the main segment value instead of question mark. This has effects e.g. when calculating relative URLs. This is now obsolete, but many URL-parsing libraries have an API for that for compatibility.

felixfbecker 3y ago

The issue is that commas are technically not allowed in the search params without being percent encoded