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July 16, 2007
Custom FTP URLs
Today, I helped out another user with a ftp file download issue. They needed to be able to download files via ftp and didn't want to use another program like FileZilla or even the command prompt on windows. I did a little searching and found a link to the RFC for building custom ftp urls for use in their web browser of choice.
ftp://username:password@ftp.example.com
Now they don't have to learn how to use another application.
-Chris
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3.1. Common Internet Scheme Syntax [RFC 1738]
While the syntax for the rest of the URL may vary depending on the
particular scheme selected, URL schemes that involve the direct use
of an IP-based protocol to a specified host on the Internet use a
common syntax for the scheme-specific data:
//<user>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<url-path>
Some or all of the parts "<user>:<password>@", ":<password>",
":<port>", and "/<url-path>" may be excluded. The scheme specific
data start with a double slash "//" to indicate that it complies with
the common Internet scheme syntax. The different components obey the
following rules:
user
An optional user name. Some schemes (e.g., ftp) allow the
specification of a user name.
password
An optional password. If present, it follows the user
name separated from it by a colon.
The user name (and password), if present, are followed by a
commercial at-sign "@". Within the user and password field, any ":",
"@", or "/" must be encoded.
Note that an empty user name or password is different than no user
name or password; there is no way to specify a password without
specifying a user name. E.g., <URL:ftp://@host.com/> has an empty
user name and no password, <URL:ftp://host.com/> has no user name,
while <URL:ftp://foo:@host.com/> has a user name of "foo" and an
empty password.
host
The fully qualified domain name of a network host, or its IP
address as a set of four decimal digit groups separated by
".". Fully qualified domain names take the form as described
in Section 3.5 of RFC 1034 [13] and Section 2.1 of RFC 1123
[5]: a sequence of domain labels separated by ".", each domain
label starting and ending with an alphanumerical character and
possibly also containing "-" characters. The rightmost domain
label will never start with a digit, though, which
syntactically distinguishes all domain names from the IP
addresses.
port
The port number to connect to. Most schemes designate
protocols that have a default port number. Another port number
may optionally be supplied, in decimal, separated from the
host by a colon. If the port is omitted, the colon is as well.
url-path
The rest of the locator consists of data specific to the
scheme, and is known as the "url-path". It supplies the
details of how the specified resource can be accessed. Note
that the "/" between the host (or port) and the url-path is
NOT part of the url-path.
The url-path syntax depends on the scheme being used, as does the
manner in which it is interpreted.
Posted at 05:16 PM in General IT | Permalink
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Comments
Hey, Chris - great to meet you at Gnomedex.
You didn't mention which platform your customer was on, but if they're on Windows, I understand that this doesn't work in IE7. Here's a random hit from Google that gives some detail and documents a workaround using Windows Explorer.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Explorer-7-(Ie7)-As-A-Ftp-Client-Does-Not-Work&id=413363
Posted by: Jack Brewster | Aug 11, 2007 11:31:41 AM
Hii I enjoy the cold beer in summers using koozies at http://trueimprint.com/.
Posted by: Pardeep | Mar 7, 2008 1:25:23 AM