Support semicolon as a normal character in URI (no longer a parameter separator)

Expected result

According to the 2014 W3C Recommendation, semicolon is now illegal as a parameter separator in a http URI. ?foo=bar;baz means the parameter foo will have the value bar;baz

see https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/forms.html#url-encoded-form-data (thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3481664/semicolon-as-url-query-separator)

Current result

The URI decoder now supports the obsolete 1999 W3C recommendation ?foo=bar;baz is decoded as ?foo=bar & baz=

(see QueryStringDecoder.java, line 230 : case '&': case ';': both characters are handled equally)

Netty version

tested (through vert.x) on 1.4.19

JVM version (e.g. java -version)

1.8.0_60

OS version (e.g. uname -a)

Windows i686-pc Intel

Of course this issue is linked to #3044 and #2896, but as the norm changed, I suppose it’s better to open a new issue

[slandelle]

Note also that when encoding an URL with java URI.tostring(), semicolons are not encoded, so the client has extra replaces to do before sending the request

I suppose you mean: if my server is Netty and uses QueryStringDecoder, I have to encode semicolons manually so QueryStringDecoder doesn’t mess up with parsing, as URI.toString() won’t encode them (which is expected).

For me the correction would only be to delete the case ‘;’ : on line 230 of QueryStringDecoder.java. But maybe there are tests to correct also. Never done a PR but I can try…

This is a low hanging fruit so it would be a perfect ft for a first PR indeed 😃

[marcban]

1/ exactly! 2/ I have some docs to read first… 😃