Commas in URL

Marketing
1

Are there any reasons to not use a comma (, <- one of these fellas ;)) in a URL?

For example, http://domain.com/something/0,123,3.html ?

Sean :slight_smile:

2

Iā€™ve never heard of a problem with commas, I personally wouldnā€™t use them because I donā€™t think theyā€™re a standard URL character.

3

I seem them on a lot of news/archived sitesā€¦ doesnā€™t appear to be a problem, but as aspen saidā€¦ you might as well need themā€¦ and surely you donā€™t NEED to use them.

4

Thanks both. Perhaps somebody cleverer than me can tell me what this has to say on the issue

Sean :slight_smile:

5

Looks like a comma is okay according to that document ā€“ I still wouldnā€™t use one though.

6

Any reasons apart from your previous post Chris?

Sean :slight_smile:

7

They just seem like a good way to confuse visitors. I donā€™t think most people are used to typing commas in URLs.

Plus Iā€™d rather have something thats keyword rich and

keyword,keyword,keyword would just look weird.

8

Try to do a domain search on GoDaddy.com. NetworkSolutions.com, etc. for a domain with a comma in it (For instance, I tried www.Tampa,FL.com) and theyā€™ll tell you it is not proper syntax. Whether thatā€™s right or wrong, itā€™s hard to use a domain if you canā€™t register it!

Iā€™m not sure how that might translate into using them for folder names or file names. Never tried it, and I agree that it would look strange. But then again, all of this looked strange at some point! :wink:

9

a comma in a domain name is VERY different from a comma in a filenameā€¦

You can have commas in filenames, but you are very limited to the characters of a domain name

10

Thanks for the comments everybody. Iā€™ll have to do some pondering

Sean :slight_smile:

11

Sean,
I need to read it in deep but at a first glance here it said that the comma is a reserved character:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

2.2. Reserved Characters

Many URI include components consisting of or delimited by, certain
special characters. These characters are called ā€œreservedā€, since
their usage within the URI component is limited to their reserved
purpose. If the data for a URI component would conflict with the
reserved purpose, then the conflicting data must be escaped before
forming the URI.

  reserved    = ";" | "/" | "?" | ":" | "@" | "&" | "=" | "+" |
                "$" | ","

The ā€œreservedā€ syntax class above refers to those characters that are
allowed within a URI, but which may not be allowed within a
particular component of the generic URI syntax; they are used as
delimiters of the components described in Section 3.

Characters in the ā€œreservedā€ set are not reserved in all contexts.
The set of characters actually reserved within any given URI
component is defined by that component. In general, a character is
reserved if the semantics of the URI changes if the character is
replaced with its escaped US-ASCII encoding.

2.3. Unreserved Characters

Data characters that are allowed in a URI but do not have a reserved
purpose are called unreserved. These include upper and lower case
letters, decimal digits, and a limited set of punctuation marks and
symbols.

  unreserved  = alphanum | mark

  mark        = "-" | "_" | "." | "!" | "~" | "*" | "'" | "(" | ")"

Unreserved characters can be escaped without changing the semantics
of the URI, but this should not be done unless the URI is being used
in a context that does not allow the unescaped character to appear.

The specification is not too much clear ( to me, no the spec itself ) on whatā€™s that ``reserved purpose ā€˜ā€™

But Iā€™d not use the comma :slight_smile:

:slight_smile: andrea

12

Itā€™s not very clear for me either Andrea!

Sean :slight_smile:

13

Using commas in a URL is not the most compliant way to build your site navigation. At the very least, I would use the URL escape character (%2C) for a comma in the file name.

Best,
Jason

14

It would make sense to use a comma if you need to have a list of variables in a URL, for example for generating a graph on the server.

15

Iā€™m facing the same problem,
Any one let me know using commaā€™s in url are allowed are not. Do search engines read them?
<snip/>

16

I guess the confusion is due to using

URI Universal Resource Indentifier
URL Universal Resource Location

These are similar but NOT the same thing.

If you donā€™t know the difference you probably donā€™t need to worry about it much, but better yet, do a Search and read up a bit.

In a nutshell, If your link works it works.

This thread is very old, putting it to rest.