Cannot include spaces in JSON pointers

[yahelnachum]

Seems that references ($ref) that contain the space character do not compile correctly. Spaces seem to work in other public online JSV validators. Should this crate support that as well or is there a reason (e.g. any of the underlying specifications go against that idea) that it does not?

JSON schema

{
  "$schema": "https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema",
  "$ref": "#/ar ray",
  "ar ray": {
    "type": "array"
  }
}

Public online JSV validator: https://www.jsonschemavalidator.net/

[Stranger6667]

Hi!

From JSON Schema spec:

The value of the "$ref" keyword MUST be a string which is a URI-Reference.

Here is the relevant part of the grammar from RFC 3986:

fragment      = *( pchar / "/" / "?" )
pchar         = unreserved / pct-encoded / sub-delims / ":" / "@"
unreserved    = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." / "_" / "~"
reserved      = gen-delims / sub-delims
gen-delims    = ":" / "/" / "?" / "#" / "[" / "]" / "@"
sub-delims    = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")"
                 / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "="

Space is not a part of them, hence should be encoded and #/ar ray is not a valid URI per RFC 3986.

Some libraries are more lenient with this, e.g. Python's jsonschema accepts both variants (#/ar ray and #/ar%20ray), but others are not (e.g. hyperjump). At some point I switched to a strict RFC 3986 parser because before they were URLs parsed by the url crate, but I haven't consider how lenient it should be given that most of the ecosystem (as far as I can tell) don't enforce strict parsing of URIs.

Hope it helps! :)

[yahelnachum]

@Stranger6667 thank you for the response. That helps a lot!

So apart from an option within this crate to allow spaces, I guess maybe I could make a preprocessing step to percent encode any spaces before compiling my schemas. I'll have to think through any other options at my disposal and decide whats best.

Thanks again for the comment!

[clawdney]

Hi! I'm interested in helping with this. Could you share more context about the use case?