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Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2005 16:47:57 +1200
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Subject: Scheme identification in stream wrappers
From: packrat@nznet.gen.nz ("Morgan L. Owens")

It was suggested I post this here.

In PHP, the character sequence "://" separates the protocol name from 
the protocol-specific part of a stream name. Clearly, the intention is 
that these stream names are URLs (i.e., URIs that actually provide a 
location for the identified resource). However, the URI specification 
(RFC 3986) states that the scheme delimiter is merely ":", and that 
"://" is only applicable for _some_ URI formats. There are URLs in 
common use that do not use "://" (e.g., mailto:), and in fact support 
for "zlib:" is a hardwired exception in the present code.

May I propose that the parser which parses out the scheme from the rest 
of the URL look only for the initial ":" in the stream name, rather than 
"://".

Existing uses of stream wrappers will continue to function, since the 
name of the scheme won't actually change, and it's the wrapper author's 
responsibility to parse the rest of the URL anyway; but it will become 
possible to correctly write, e.g., "mailto:eric@example.com" instead of 
"mailto://eric@example.com", or (to use the example used in the manual 
to describe stream_wrapper_register()) "var:myvar" instead of "var://myvar".

This would also make use of parse_url() more consistent as, for example, 
parse_url('var:myvar') will put the name of myvar into the path element 
of the returned array, instead of mistakenly putting it in the host element.

MLO