How should URLs with filters containing . characters be encoded?

[sproctor]

I'm trying to filter on a floating point number. I expected the query to be something like: /table?column=eq."0.25", but with that I get the error: "invalid input syntax for type numeric: \"\"0.25\"\"". Sending /table?column=eq.0.25 works, but that seems to violate the URL grammar.

[steve-chavez]

Sending /table?column=eq.0.25 works, but that seems to violate the URL grammar.

@sproctor The above should be fine, after the . every char is accepted. There's an undocumented ABNF here:

operation = ["not."] (operator "." val / "in." in-val)
val = *CHAR
PostgREST/postgrest-docs#228 (comment)

I do understand the confusion, on #2066 we discussed changing the operator to the left (like /table?column.eq=0.25), which also has other advantages.

[sproctor]

Thank you so much for your response.

Is there a clear way to handle . in values? I was ignoring them and occasionally had issues, although investigating more, I'm not sure what the cause was, because the only queries giving me issues contained ., I assumed they were the problem.

In the current situation, how should a value be encoded? It seems like the simplest is to quote all in-val values and add a backslash before any quotes in those, but don't escape other values at all?

[sproctor]

My solution was to do nothing unless the value is in a logical expression or in list. Then add backslashes before double quotes and add double quotes around the value if it contains any reserved characters. From my limited testing, this seems to be the correct way to encode values.