URL characters encoding

Hi!

I am using awesome httpie to talk to the REST API of YiDB tool which has unusual request URLs for querying that contain [, @ and ]. Examples follow:

GET repositories/cmsdb/branches/main/query/ApplicationService[@label="srp-app"]
GET repositories/cmsdb/branches/main/query/ServiceInstance[@domain =~ "ebay.*" and @activeManifestDiff = false]

The problem is: when I use http to query one of such URLs, I get 500 server error in response because these symbols ([, @, ]) are passed to the server unencoded. The request URL to server ends up being:

http://localhost:8080/cms/repositories/Asset/branches/main/query/Server[@name="test"]

Dirty solution: when I brutally use urllib to encode that part of the URL string inside httpie, it works great with the request URL ending up to be:

http://localhost:8080/cms/repositories/Asset/branches/main/query/Server%5B%40name%3D%22test%22%5D

Question is: What would be your recommendation to overcome this issue?

I have big doubts that this is necessary http’s problem, but I would like to sort this out and be able to use the API with stock httpie. So is there any way I can form the desired URL with CLI arguments, or is it undoable without code patching?

If it’s only through code change, I can prettify my changes and make a pull request to further discuss.

What are your thoughts on this?

Thank you!

[sigmavirus24]

@zoresvit to be clear (and hopefully not condescending) I speak only for the library on top of which @jakubroztocil built httpie. If the project/@jakubroztocil wants to add -G and -d that is their decision (as I said earlier). Regardless, they should not expect requests to provide any options, keyword arguments, or anything else to do this for them. This functionality would have to entirely live within httpie.

[rkiyanchuk]

@sigmavirus24 Just a follow-up regarding curl: it has some of its own URL globbing parser which can be turned off with -g parameter. So when used with -g it successfully forms the request URL just like httpie does — without encoding [, and @ — so it just additionally supports our conclusion that httpie does the right thing and YiDB is processing the incoming requests wrong.