Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Slashes in URLs

A file url takes the format of:
file://host/path

A special case is a "short form" when referring to a local file. So instead of saying file://c:/this/that/foo.txt you should be able to say file:///this/that/foo.txt.

Since a windows share can be specified as //MACHINENAME from any local machine on the network I would wager to say that the reason:
file://///PCName/Sharedfolder/filename.vbf
uses 5 slashs is that the first two are part of the URL format, the 3rd slash forces the URI to refer to the local machine, then the next two slashes refer to the sharename (aka Computername) which could be the local machine or another machine on the nextwork.

In theory if Sharedfolder/filename.vbf can be referenced from root you could write this as:
file:///Sharedfolder/filename.vbf and have it work.

References:
File URLs
file: URL Test Cases


Posted by: djuggler | 10:42 PM |