uriiri

alphanumeric strings can be also URI or IRI?

I have data with alphanumeric ids like 9625ea21a1bf1be22963576fcdfd863d. Can I say this is also an IRI (internationalized resource identifier) or URI value?

All URI examples are like aaa.txt, aaa/bbb.html, or protocol://aaa/bbb.ext#tag.

Solution

  • RFC 3986 (which is IETF’s Internet Standard for URIs) what a URI is.

    The generic URI syntax is:

    scheme ":" hier-part [ "?" query ] [ "#" fragment ]

    As you can see, a URI requires at least a "scheme" component, followed by the : character, followed by components defined under "hier-part".

    So 9625ea21a1bf1be22963576fcdfd863d can’t possibly be a URI.

    It could of course be a relative reference, namely a relative-path reference. For example, if you have the following hyperlink in a HTML document with the URI file:///folder1/folder2/document1, the target URI would be file:///folder1/folder2/9625ea21a1bf1be22963576fcdfd863d:

    <a href="9625ea21a1bf1be22963576fcdfd863d">link</a>

    (For IRIs, which are defined in RFC 3987, it’s essentially the same.)