I'm programming a script that pulls data out of the PATH_INFO environment variable. All of a sudden, when I try sending some data that includes colons (":") in the URL, IIS chokes and returns a 404 error. Bull****.
Despite the fact that colons are permitted in the path portion of the URL, I tried encoding them and got the same result.
What is the deal with this? Is there any way to make it work right?
For example:
http://www.example.com/script.cfm/blah/
= fine
----------
http://www.example.com/script.cfm/blah::blah/
or
http://www.example.com/script.cfm/blah%3A%3Ablah/
= 404
(both URLs work fine on Apache / Linux).
Since no one here showed any interest in responding to my post, I posted the same thing to a Microsoft newsgroup and this is the reply I got:
Hi JMM,
IIS does not permit colons in the URL. This is because the NTFS file system
considers a colon to be a special character that's used to denote alternate
streams within a file. If your example URL below were handled by the static
file handler in IIS, it would attemps to open the stream called "blah"
within a file called "blah" in the "script.cfm" directory under wwwroot.
More specifically, without this limitation, if a client were to request
http://www.example.com/script.cfm::$data, then the contents of the
script.cfm file would get sent to the client instead of invoking ColdFusion
to process script.cfm.
If you want to prevent IIS from parsing your data, then put it either in the
query string or the entity body. A colon would be allowed in either of
those places.