Asterisk in Pathname | Yahoo Special Script?

[0rthodontist]

I have a bunch of links that are like

[URL]http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061105/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq

[/URL]

(that's one link)

with an asterisk and then a new address in the middle of them. Is that for a special-purpose Yahoo script or is there a standard meaning for an asterisk in that context?

 

[robphy]

Here's another example

http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.physicsforums.com/

which might help answer your question. I'm curious to know the answer as well.

 

[-Job-]

I think it's used as a separator to easily distinguish a page parameter from the page path. Generally a "?" followed by name/value pairs joined by "&" is used, but what's probably happening is that a web server splits the url at the asterisk, the first element being the path, the second the parameter. One advantage of this approach, that i can think of, is that you can have a wider variety of chars in the parameter without them being URL encoded.