Cleaning up stack URLs

[Devin Asay]

I'm working on a stack that launches stacks from the web with 'go  
stack URL'.

I know there are certain characters that are illegal or unsafe in URL  
strings. (See http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738) These include  
space, quote and a number of others. Most web browsers automatically  
escape these characters for you, so, e.g., a space is converted to '% 
20' before the browser sends the request to the server.

I'm about to start writing a function that checks a potential stack  
URL for illegal and unsafe characters and converts them to escape  
sequences, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if such a thing  
already exists.

Am I right that there is no equivalent functionality built into Rev?  
I know about URLEncode(), of course, but that serves a different  
purpose--formatting strings for POSTing, rather than formatting  
strings for retrieving files from a server (a GET request?) Am I  
understanding this correctly?

A related issue is, are there characters that are disallowed as  
filenames for rev stackfiles? I can't find any such list anywhere. I  
suppose this would be determined by the host OS?

Thanks.

Devin

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University