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RFC 8959 / SECRET IDENTIFICATION

Build the token from allowed characters

02

The grammar is a scheme name, a colon, and one or more pchar characters. pchar comes from URI syntax: letters, digits, selected punctuation and valid percent-encoded octets.

RFC 8959 · § 2EXAMPLE
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Build the token from allowed characterssecret-token:caf%C3%A9%20%2F is the complete generated string. Bare %, empty token and raw / are invalid scheme syntax.secret-token:caf%C3%A9%20%2FComplete fictional issued URIValid: token data is percent-encodedInvalid: empty token · bare % · raw /RFC8959 · public fictional fixtures · schematic
04
Issue the encoded URI

secret-token:caf%C3%A9%20%2F is the complete generated string. Bare %, empty token and raw / are invalid scheme syntax.

Source for this drawing: RFC 8959 · Read RFC section 2 ↗

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KEY POINT

The token is nonempty: secret-token-URI = secret-token-scheme ":" token; token = 1*pchar. URI syntax is not an entropy or authorization check.

  • The token is nonempty: secret-token-URI = secret-token-scheme ":" token; token = 1*pchar. URI syntax is not an entropy or authorization check.
  • pchar permits unreserved characters, sub-delimiters, colon and @, plus % followed by two hexadecimal digits. A raw slash, question mark, hash, space or non-ASCII character is outside pchar.
  • Disallowed characters MUST be encoded into UTF-8 and then percent-encoded. Apply encoding when issuing the token; do not rewrite a token that was already issued.
  • This is a token identifier, not a web address to visit. A percent-encoded slash is token data, not a path separator.
DETAILS

RFC8959 §2 and RFC3986 §§2.1,2.2,2.3,3.3. Diagram proportions are schematic; café / is a fictional low-entropy teaching value, not a usable credential.

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