Query Strings

[Brian Evans]

Greetings,
I got a bug report recently for Bombadillo about how I have been handling query strings.
I had accidentally left a big in where I was chaining queries:

some.site/thing.gmi?hello?world

They brought up, and it seemed clear to me, that the query should be replaced and not
added on to. So I have done that update (and it will be a part of a big release soon, for
which I will notify the list when it happens).

The other thing they brought up was escaping before sending to the server. Bombadillo
does not escape querystrings currently (for gopher or for gemini).

A look at the spec provides no further explanation re: what is expected: escaped or
unescaped? The spec does point to an RFC that no doubt encourages the escaping
of querystrings (I have not read through the RFC recently)... 

However, in practice, servers offering search (GUS and Houston) do not seem to
unescape a query that is sent to them. I have not tested places other than those two
but neither seems to do so. If I send:

some.site/thing.gmi?This%2C+is+a+string

GUS reports the search string as: "This%2C+is+a+string"
But it should, if escaping and unescaping is expected, report it as: "This, is a string"

I think it would be good to clearly state what is expected of clients and servers
regarding the escaping of querystring values for gemini.

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