File Uri Scheme and Relative Files

Question

Assume that the scheme for a uri is "file". Also assume that the path starts with '.'

An example path is './.bashrc'. How would the fulluri look? 'file://./.bashrc' appears odd to me.

Answer 1

In short, a file URL takes the form of:

file://localhost/absolute/path/to/file [ok]

or you can omit the host (but not the slash):

file:///absolute/path/to/file [ok]

but not this:

file://file_at_current_dir [no way]

nor this:

file://./file_at_current_dir [no way]

I just confirmed that via Python's urllib2.urlopen()

More detail from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_URI_scheme:

"file:///foo.txt" is okay, while "file://foo.txt" is not,
although some interpreters manage to handle the latter