URL normalization

[Chris]

Does anyone know of code to normalize a URL? We're processing a lot of URLs,
and we get a lot of bad ones:

http://mydomain.com/mydir/../anotherdir/ (/../)
http://mydomain.com/mydir\/anotherdir/ (backslashes)
http://mydomain.com/mydir//anotherdir/ (extra slashes)
http://mydomain.com/mydir/file name here.htm (filename with spaces)

I'm sure there's a lot of stuff out there that I haven't seen yet, either.
I'm wondering if anyone has already written a class that will clean this
stuff up.

 

[Andrew Thompson]

Does anyone know of code to normalize a URL? We're processing a lot of URLs,
and we get a lot of bad ones:

Why, where do they originate?

It is probably better strategy to put
editing and checking of URL's at the
input stage, if you can, so you never get
these bad URL's.

http://mydomain.com/mydir/../anotherdir/ (/../)

So does this exist?
http://mydomain.com/anotherdir/

URL's, AFAIR, will resolve that correctly
if it actually poinsts somewhere that exists.
(And if it does not, how do you determine what
the user actually meant?)

http://mydomain.com/mydir\/anotherdir/ (backslashes)
http://mydomain.com/mydir//anotherdir/ (extra slashes)
http://mydomain.com/mydir/file name here.htm (filename with spaces)

The last one can be solved by using
URLEncoder.encode()

I'm sure there's a lot of stuff out there that I haven't seen yet, either.
I'm wondering if anyone has already written a class that will clean this
stuff up.

It sounds like it needs to have DWIMNWIS
functionality, or implement the Psychic
interface. ;-)

 

[Real Gagnon]

Does anyone know of code to normalize a URL? We're processing a lot of

URLs, and we get a lot of bad ones:

http://mydomain.com/mydir/../anotherdir/ (/../)
http://mydomain.com/mydir\/anotherdir/ (backslashes)
http://mydomain.com/mydir//anotherdir/ (extra slashes)
http://mydomain.com/mydir/file name here.htm (filename with spaces)

You may want to check the java.net.URI class, you will find a normalize()
method to do that.

Bye.