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?