Mailing List Archive

Hi folks -

*TL;DNR:* Can MediaWiki encode URL fragments in its API responses?

The iOS team noticed the MediaWiki Notifications API
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Notifications/API> returns partially
encoded URLs - the paths look to be encoded, but the fragments are not.
This causes issues with user talk page notifications with topic title
fragments in certain languages:

...
"legacyPrimary": {
"url": "//
ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%86%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%B4_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%AE%D8%AF%D9%85:Tsevener?markasread=29965554&markasreadwiki=arwiki#
???_???",
"label": "???? ???????"
}
...

Our Swift URLs (which are based on RFC 1808) fail to instantiate with these
unencoded fragments. This led to some cross-team discussion on T307603
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T307603> about where and how to fix
this. Does this seem like something that could (or should) be fixed deeper
within MediaWiki? Can we encode the fragments of urls in the response of
any MediaWiki API?

@matmarex did some excellent investigation in this comment
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T307603#7955104>, and it sounds like the
original Chrome bug that led to this unencoded fragment need within
MediaWiki is no longer an issue. We're open to fixing it client-side if
this proposal is a no-go, but I wanted to make sure we weren't putting in a
client-side workaround for a server-side workaround that is no longer
needed. I appreciate any thoughts!

*Toni Sevener*
iOS Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>