It's actually not really clearly stated in the standard (RFC 3986) whether a percent-encoded version of .
or ..
is supposed to have the same this-folder/up-a-folder meaning as the unescaped version. Section 3.3 only talks about “The path segments .
and ..
”, without clarifying whether they match .
and ..
before or after pct-encoding.
Personally I find Firefox's interpretation that %2E
does not mean .
most practical, but unfortunately all the other browsers disagree. This would mean that you can't have a path component containing only .
or ..
.
I think the only possible suggestion is “don't do that”! There are other path components that are troublesome too, typically due to server limitations: %2F
, %00
and %5C
sequences in paths may also be blocked by some web servers, and the empty path segment can also cause problems. So in general it's not possible to fit all possible byte sequences into a path component.