Dot Paths in Harp 0.17.0 -- a Bug?

Today when I was writing my last post I ran into a funny bug with the way that Harp handles url paths. Namely, I wanted my url path for the post to be: "value-enablePlugins-is-not-a-member-of-sbt.Project" in order to capture the error message properly. But when I did this I got an error form harp! Complaints about not finding the value for the key in my _data.json file.

Investigating, console.log(current.source) told me that the expected source key was: "value-enablePlugins-is-not-a-member-of-sbt". Clearly missing the last piece, and thus causing 

<% if ( ! public["tech-blog"]._data[current.source].draft) { %><%- yield %>

in my layout file to err. I isolated the error and created a simple file that had a bunch of dots in its name. Then logged the source field from the layout file:

If I typed in the file extension the file would download instantly instead of showing in the browser. This happened when it was hitting either of these urls:

And the log which you can see in the screenshot showed that the key for the file, was simple a instead of a.key.with.dots as expected.

If I go to http://localhost:9000/a.key.with.dots.md I simply get a 404 page.

Assuming that I was wrong about what I thought urls could be, I checked out RFC 1738 and looked into restrictions on the path. Section 3.3 defines the HTTP standards and all it had to say on the matter was:

Within the and components, "/", ";", "?" are reserved. The "/" character may be used within HTTP to designate a hierarchical structure.

The grammar is defined as: 

urlpath        = *xchar    ; depends on protocol see section 3.1

And looking up what the xchar is defined as results in: 

xchar          = unreserved | reserved | escape
reserved       = ";" | "/" | "?" | ":" | "@" | "&" | "="
escape         = "%" hex hex
unreserved     = alpha | digit | safe | extra
safe           = "$" | "-" | "_" | "." | "+"

No restrictions on dots there, in fact, since they're part of the safe set, they're allowed in the urls (obviously since we can do things like .html). Reading through the RFC I didn't find anything specifically saying that the dot had to specify an extension only, so I can only conclude that urls like: "a.url.with.dots" are allowed.

Under this assumption, Harp is not respecting the RFC, and specifically it is stripping the key from the JSON file to the first part before any dots. For now, until this is fixed you'll need to avoid using dots in URLs.