Can i use "==" in a http query string?

Question

if I have a query string like:

?key1=val1&key2==val2

how it should be parsed?

like:

key   : key2= 
value : val2

or

key   : key2 
value : =val2

what would be the key and the value in this case?

Is this allowed to have == sequencies in query string?

And what about following query strings?

?key=val&=====

is that syntactically correct?

Thanks

I think in practice it's going to depend on what you want to use them for. — Casey
– Casey, Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 17:47
I never tried it but i think if you try to read the key2 you will get =vale2. — Felipe Oriani
– Felipe Oriani, Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 17:51
I don't know about syntax rules, but I would definitely recommend against it. What are you trying to accomplish? — JLRishe
– JLRishe, Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 17:52
Judging from PHP implementation (SAPI.treat_data, used by both parse_str and in the internal params parsing), = symbol is always treated as the one separating the keys and values, and system-level separator (usually &) is used to separate the pairs. So in your first case, key2 will be the key, and =val2 will be the value. In your second case, the last series of ===== will be just ignored, as there's no key to extract there. — raina77ow
– raina77ow, Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 18:10
I'm not sure, however, that all the query parser implementations follow the same routine. And it's up to implementation, as w3 only provides a recommendation of how to build a query string (source). — raina77ow
– raina77ow, Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 18:10

JLRishe · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-29 18:17:11Z

2

I think you're likely to run into implementation-specific behavior if you try to use query strings like that, but at least as far as .NET's HttpUtility.ParseQueryString() goes, the breakdown would be:

key1=val1&key2==val2

key1 - val1
key2 - =val2


key=val&=====

key - val
    - ====     (key is blank, value is four =)

So this is basically equivalent to splitting the query string on & and then splitting each of those segments on the first =.

answered Jan 29, 2015 at 18:17

JLRishe

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abl Over a year ago

Same behavior in Java servlets (HttpServletRequest.getParameter())

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