Can a URL have an asterisk?

Question

I notice Wikipedia allows them in their URLs, is it legit or does anyone know where it will give me problems?

score 23 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 24 '17 at 23:10

23

It's legit and intended to be a delimiter ; see Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax

edited Aug 24 '17 at 23:10

Alexis Wilke

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answered Jan 10 '11 at 06:03

Richard Harrison

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Thanks for the answer years ago forgot to say so! – Kristopher Ives Oct 04 '16 at 21:49

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 10 '11 at 06:08

11

As per http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt YES, you can.

...Only alphanumerics [0-9a-zA-Z], the special characters "$-_.+!*'()," [not including the quotes - ed], and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.

refer: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm

answered Jan 10 '11 at 06:08

Nishant

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Wasn't me, honest! I chose the other answer because it was shorter and used the word "legit" (I'm a simple person) – Kristopher Ives Jan 14 '11 at 17:46
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You are citing a really ancient document. The latest and greatest is RFC 3986. – Julian Reschke Mar 27 '12 at 16:50

score 7 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 07 '21 at 08:14

Yes. All of the sub-delims characters can be used as is in the path. Sub-delimiters include the asterisk (*) character:

sub-delims    = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")"
              / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "="

There are several types of URIs, but in general, a path is defined as a set of segments separated by a slash:

path-absolute = "/" [ segment-nz *( "/" segment ) ]

The segments are composed of characters (segment-nz cannot be empty):

segment       = *pchar
segment-nz    = 1*pchar

And pchar includes sub-delims:

pchar         = unreserved / pct-encoded / sub-delims / ":" / "@"

Reference: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#appendix-A

Can a URL have an asterisk?

3 Answers3

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