servo / servo/rust-url

API To Determine if String Needs Encoding

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
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Forks
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Description

Background

Sometimes you wish to take a string and verify that it has been correctly escaped. Particularly if % is in the escaped character list, you can't just percent-encode the string to be safe, as this will change the string.

This is exactly the case on https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/pull/2356 where I wanted an API to check if a given byte is "legal".

Proposed Solution

AsciiSet::should_percent_encode would be perfect, however, it is private. I therefore hacked around this by doing

byte.is_ascii() || percent_encode(&[c], <AsciiSet>).next().unwrap().len() != 1

But it would be nicer if the method on AsciiSet were exposed.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the private AsciiSet::should_percent_encode method and the percent_encode API described in the issue. Expose the method so callers can determine whether a byte needs percent encoding, then verify that the public API supports the stated legality check.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
networking
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

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