Query String problem

[djfletch]

I'm trying to use iSiloX to convert a large set of web pages. The pages contain query strings, and errors are being generated when the strings are being parsed. I'd like iSilo to ignore them. Is there any way to have iSiloX ignore HREF query strings?

Thanks,
Dan

[iSilo]

You can add a URL filter to exclude the following of any links with a question mark in them. Try adding a regular expression based URL filter with simply a question mark as the pattern. Note that you would not be able to do this with a wildcard based URL filter since the question mark serves as a wild card for any single character.

[djfletch]

Thanks for the input. However, I don't want to exclude the links with query strings, I just want to exclude the query strings because iSiloX gives me errors on them. When there's a query string, I just want iSiloX to ignore it, but still go to the web page. When I leave the query strings intact, I get error messages from iSiloX, but when I naviagte the links in IE, they work fine. Any ideas?

Thanks!
P.S. The typical error message in the log looks like this:
Unable to open: file:///c%3a/vdh/drugs/vdhac8b.html%3ff%3d1%26t%3db

where there is conversion of the "?" and "=" characters to the %### characters. Any ideas??

[iSilo]

? gets converted to %3F and = gets converted to %3D because 3F and 3D are the hexadecimal representations of those characters, respectively. Those characters get escaped because they are not normally valid characters in a file name. In a normal HTTP URL, those characters would not be escaped since a web server normally understand those characters as a query on some type of "active" page.

There is no way to tell iSiloX to ignore the query part of a URL.

Generally, the query part is essential to the integrity of the link in that the target of the link is expected to result in some contextual answer to the query. So if the query part has no meaning, then it seems you can ignore the messages since the link would not be correct anyway.

[djfletch]

Well, it looks like the only solution will be to write a program to strip out all of the query strings. When I open these files in IE, the links work just fine. My guess is that IE is ignoring the query strings, and that's why it works. IE just jumps to the link and ignores (or generates an internal error message that it doesn't tell me about), but it still jumps to the URL and ignores the query string.

I'm guessing this isn't a common problem since you haven't had to deal with it before. Looks like it's time to brush up on my VB skills!

Dan