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Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:11:42 -0600 (CST)
To: "Dave Ingram" <dave@dmi.me.uk>
Cc: "Nathan Rixham" <nrixham@gmail.com>,
 internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Dots and spaces in variable names are converted to   
        underscores.
From: ceo@l-i-e.com ("Richard Lynch")

I have taken the liberty of making an RFC for this:
http://wiki.php.net/rfc/url_dots

Feel free to add/edit it as fit, particularly since it's my first use
of that RFC wiki, and I'm not good at wiki markup, and I probably
missed something from this thread.

I intentionally left out the ?a_b=1&a.b=2 because that seemed to me to
be beyond the scope, since ?a_b=1&a_b=2 is equally problematic in
PHP...

That said, I am now leaning towards not trying to be BC, and just
dropping 'a_b' entirely.

It seems unlikely that anybody doing anything "sane" to attempt to
reconstruct their original keys is going to be hurt by PHP not messing
them up anymore.

Most likely, their revisionary code is simply not going to find any
'a_b' to blindly revert to 'a.b' anymore, and the 'a.b' is going to
just sail through.

Of course, their a.b might be a^b or a*b or whatever, but whatever it
is, PHP not messing it up will just mean their code won't find
anything to "un-do" any more.

I did think of one other issue though:

There may be some really funky character that is valid in the URL, but
that is not kosher for an array/hash key which is currently being
masked...

It would still have to be masked if such a character exists...

I can't think of any such character, but what with i18n of DNS records
and whatnot these days, I am woefully ignorant of what might be in the
keys.

I put that into the RFC already.

-- 
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