[Docutils-develop] [docutils:feature-requests] #54 Allow unescaped white space in URI context

[Günter M. <mi...@us...>]

- **status**: open --> closed-rejected



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**[feature-requests:#54] Allow unescaped white space in URI context**

**Status:** closed-rejected
**Group:** Default
**Created:** Mon Apr 03, 2017 01:40 AM UTC by Getreu
**Last Updated:** Wed Apr 05, 2017 04:51 PM UTC
**Owner:** nobody


David Goodger authored 2017-02-06 the following commit "Added support for escaped whitespace in URI contexts". Compared to the situation before where whitespace had to be % encoded this is huge improvement because it now allows the following:

```
.. image:: größeres\ Bild.jpg
```

I order to improve ergonomics more I suggest also allowing unescaped whitespace in URI context. This would follow the same syntax as `.. include` paths:

```
.. image:: größeres Bild.jpg

.. include:: schöne Einleitung.rst
```
*Besides ergonomics this proposal also improves consistancy.* 

The proposal arises from a discussion in this  [bug report 315](https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/bugs/315/) where some concerns had ben expressed:

>  Bare (unescaped) spaces in URIs will not be supported in reST because they are inherently ambiguous.
> The fact that the "include" directive works with spaces in the path, without backslashes escaping the spacees, may just be an oversight, a happy accident. "include" is defined as requiring a filesystem path, whereas "image" requires a URI. We may revisit how "include" handles spaces in future.
> For consistency, we may eventually implement the following:
> `.. include:: path\ with\ spaces.txt`

I believe this is the wrong way to go: The unescaped version is the most ergonomic, it works well for a long time and imposing escaped whitespace would break exisiting inputs. For consistancy URI paths should allow whitespace too.


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