[platform-ua-dev] problem with topic URLs that include a "+"

[Richard O Curtis <rocurtis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In the course of packaging an existing set of Help
topics as an Eclipse Help plug-in, we've discovered
that topics whose URLs contain the "+" character cannot
be found by the Help system. Using a toc.xml that
contains these two entries:

   <topic label="Test+case" href="topics/testcase.htm"/>
   <topic label="Test+case" href="topics/test+case.htm"/>

the first entry works but the second displays a "The
topic that you have requested is not available."
message. It looks to us like "+' is a legal character in
an http URL, so we were going to open a defect in
bugzilla, but before we do, I wanted to check the list
to see if anyone else has seen this problem or has any
background on why it exists. (We can make this happen
in any version of Eclipse since 3.0.)

thanks,

Richard O. Curtis
Senior Software Engineer
ClearCase Engineering
Rational Software
IBM Software Group
20 Maguire Rd.
Lexington, MA 02421-3112

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