Is it possible to use custom separtator for query string multi values?

[gansbrest]

In the documentation it says:

.addSearch({ foo: ["bar", "baz"] })
    // -> ?foo=bar&foo=baz ( duplicate foo twice in the qstring )

But I need to produce this:

    // -> ?foo=bar;baz - ";" as separator for multivalues

That way I could shorten my urls a bit for pages with lots of options ( ecommerce faceting ) since browsers like IE impose limit to the length of URI..

Same goes for parsing strings with multi values defined with custom separator.

Hope you got the idea.

[rodneyrehm]

This sounds like a problem only a hand full of people might have. What keeps you from parsing/serializing your ;-structure outside of URI.js?

[gansbrest]

I use URI builder to construct final query string from the object:

For example I have my DOM structure like this

...
<a class="facet" data-value="54" data-id="size" href="?size=54">54</a>
<a class="facet" data-value="56" data-id="size" href="?size=56">56</a>
...

I can write a sample script which will go through all $(".facet") elements and create structure like this:

{ size: [ 54, 56 ] }

which I could easily feed to URI builder to get proper URI (?size=54;56) and send to backend to fetch more items ( and update browser history state with selected items ).

Then on my nodejs backend I would do the opposite - parse out query string like ?size=54;56 into { size: [ 54, 56 ] } for further execution.

Basically it would be nice to have some kind of flag for URI query builder qStringSeparator="|"; // null by default If it's null, then create duplicates like it already does, but if qStringSeparator is set, use that for fields aggregation and extraction.

You are right, I could do all of it outside of URI library, but it feels like this functionality logically belongs to the library, since it's already doing a bunch of nifty URI transformations.

[rodneyrehm]

I'm reluctant to introduce something like. If you want this functionality in the URI handling layer, you can duckpunch™ the URI.parseQuery and URI.buildQuery methods.

Maybe this would be another thing for the URI.hooks I proposed in #28.

[gansbrest]

Those URI.hooks sound interesting. Are those merged in? Could you please provide some code sample of how I would utilize hooks for my task ( parse and build phases )? Or maybe a link to the documentation.

[rodneyrehm]

No, this isn't merged yet. But I'll have another look at it in a couple of days. I wanted to check how to integrate node-querystring as well...

[dornstein]

I have this challenge too in the same scenario. Producing many,many values in the query string all with the same name is creating both ugly URIs but also hitting length limits at times. It would be better to collapse them into a single name with multiple values (I believe ',' not ';' is the accepted rule for this in a URI).

What is the reason for not doing that all the time?

[rodneyrehm]

What is the reason for not doing that all the time?

Because it does not work for every software consuming URLs. Query strings are annoying because they were never properly specified beyond syntax. So everybody created their own semantics on top of that. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to query strings. The only thing we can do is provide interchangeable handlers.

[dornstein]

So you're saying that having a single name with multiple values doesn't have a formally-defined (or at least sufficiently de-facto) syntax?

[rodneyrehm]

There is no (single) sufficiently de-facto syntax for multiple values for a single key in the query string of a URL, no. The following notations are what I remember to have seen before, I'm sure there are more:

?foo=bar&foo=bam
?foo[]=bar&foo[]=bam
?foo=bar,bam (varying delimiters)
?foo[]=bar,bam (varying delimiters)
?foo=[bar,bam] (varying delimiters)
?foo=["bar","bam"] (yes, JSON)

They all describe the same thing. But only if you know how to interpret the query string - and that is the problem.

That said, I don't see what's keeping you from handling the "micro syntax" yourself:

URI('?foo=bar,bam').query(true).foo.split(',') // ['bar', 'bam']
URI('?').addQuery('foo', ['bar', 'bam'].join(',')) // '?foo=bar,bam'