Bug: Invalid URL encoding - using "+" instead of "%20" for spaces

[emmanuelmathot]

Problem Description

Preview thumbnails fail to load in recent versions of STAC Browser while working correctly in older versions. The root cause is that URLs in our STAC catalogs use + to encode spaces, which is invalid according to RFC 3986.

Details

Symptoms

• Preview thumbnails fail in new STAC Browser versions
• URLs are encoded differently between browser versions

Root Cause

The href fields in our STAC catalogs use + to encode spaces in URLs, but according to RFC 3986, this is invalid:

For example, "%20" is the percent-encoding for the binary octet "00100000" (ABNF: %x20), which in US-ASCII corresponds to the space character (SP).

While + is a reserved character (sub-delim), it should not be used to represent spaces in URLs. The correct encoding is %20.

Related Issue

This behavior changed in STAC Browser:

• Asset URL encoding of "space" character radiantearth/stac-browser#804

Required Action

Update all code that generates STAC catalog URLs to use %20 instead of + for space encoding.

Areas to Check

1. STAC item/collection generation scripts
2. Asset href generation
3. Any URL construction or manipulation code
4. Existing STAC JSON files in the repository

[emmanuelmathot]

cc @m-mohr

[lhoupert]

Should we add another action that is to reprocess the whole stac catalogue to update STAC entry with correct url format? @emmanuelmathot during this update/reprocessing of the STAC catalogue entries, we could also fix the MIME type #97 ? Should we create an issue about this one off update of the stac catalogue?

[emmanuelmathot]

Yes we do need that action too.