Interface Reference

WARNING: Most of this content (with the exception of the Mozilla 1.9 XPCOM reference) is very old, and can be expected to be out of date and possibly obsolete. For better XUL documentation, please visit the XUL hub at the Mozilla Developer Center.

nsIURI

IID:	07a22cc0-0ce5-11d3-9331-00104ba0fd40
Inherits From:	nsISupports
Status:	FROZEN

URIs are essentially structured names for things -- anything. This interface provides accessors to set and query the most basic components of an URI. Subclasses, including nsIURL, impose greater structure on the URI.

This interface follows Tim Berners-Lee's URI spec (RFC2396) [1], where the basic URI components are defined as such:

 
ftp://username:password@hostname:portnumber/pathname
\ /   \               / \      / \        /\       /
-     ---------------   ------   --------  -------
                                          
                                         Path
                                Port         
                        Host      /
         UserPass                 /
Scheme                              /
\                                /
--------------------------------

PrePath

The definition of the URI components has been extended to allow for internationalized domain names [2] and the more generic IRI structure [3].

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt [2] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-idna-06.txt [3] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-masinter-url-i18n-08.txt nsIURI - interface for an uniform resource identifier w/ i18n support.

AUTF8String attributes may contain unescaped UTF-8 characters. Consumers should be careful to escape the UTF-8 strings as necessary, but should always try to "display" the UTF-8 version as provided by this interface.

AUTF8String attributes may also contain escaped characters.

Unescaping URI segments is unadvised unless there is intimate knowledge of the underlying charset or there is no plan to display (or otherwise enforce a charset on) the resulting URI substring.

An object of this interface must be created in the following way:

ioService.newURI(uri, charset, baseuri);

This interface is implemented by the following components:

Properties

readonly ACString asciiHost

The URI host with an ASCII compatible encoding. Follows the IDNA draft spec for converting internationalized domain names (UTF-8) to ASCII for compatibility with existing internet infrasture.

readonly ACString asciiSpec

The URI spec with an ASCII compatible encoding. Host portion follows the IDNA draft spec. Other parts are URL-escaped per the rules of RFC2396. The result is strictly ASCII.

AUTF8String host

The host is the internet domain name to which this URI refers. It could be an IPv4 (or IPv6) address literal. If supported, it could be a non-ASCII internationalized domain name.

Characters are NOT escaped.

AUTF8String hostPort

The host:port (or simply the host, if port == -1).

Characters are NOT escaped.

readonly ACString originCharset

The charset of the document from which this URI originated. An empty value implies UTF-8.

If this value is something other than UTF-8 then the URI components (e.g., spec, prePath, username, etc.) will all be fully URL-escaped. Otherwise, the URI components may contain unescaped multibyte UTF-8 characters.

AUTF8String password

AUTF8String path

The path, typically including at least a leading '/' (but may also be empty, depending on the protocol).