René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Redirects with dot in project name do not resolve correctly and raise 404 error instead","articleBody":"## Redirects for projects with dot in name do not resolve correctly\n\nWhen a request is made to GitLab for a project that will be redirected to a new path (HTTP 302 response), a quirk with GitLab's API is that the `path_with_namespace` passed to `https://gitlab.com/api/vi/projects/{encoded_path_with_namespace}` needs to have any dots encoded to `%2E` in order for the `Location` in the response header to be correct. Although this seems to be a \"bug\" with GitLab itself, this package could easily work around it by replacing dots with `%2E` which then makes everything work fine.\n\nWe can demonstrate this pretty simply with the following code, using a project I created and then renamed to demonstrate this behaviour:\n\n```\nimport gitlab\ngl = gitlab.Gitlab(\"https://gitlab.com\")\ngl.projects.get(\"simon.burton1/redirect.test\")\n```\n\nWhich causes:\n\n```\ngitlab.exceptions.GitlabGetError: 404: 404 Project Not Found\n```\n\nWe can see *why* this is happening by repeating the same with curl. First by doing exactly what python-gitlab is doing in `EncodedId` doing by using the url encoded fragment, as `urllib.parse.quote` would return with `safe=\"\"`:\n\n```\ncurl --request GET --url \"https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/simon.burton1%2Fredirect.test\"\nThis resource has been moved permanently to https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/76187413.test\n```\n\nNote the erroneous `.test` that is added to the redirect message by GitLab. And checking the response headers, we can see that the `Location` does indeed get this erroneous url, which will cause any redirect to ultimately 404, as that path obviously does not exist:\n\n```\n\u003c location: https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/76187413.test\n```\n\nHowever, if we encode the dots in the project path, as well as the slashes:\n\n```\ncurl --request GET --url \"https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/simon%2Eburton1%2Fredirect%2Etest\"\nThis resource has been moved permanently to https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/76187413\n```\n\nAnd we can see that the redirect location header is indeed correct:\n\n```\n\u003c location: https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/76187413\n```\n\nWe can validate that this is not a more general issue with API redirects and is limited to this behaviour with dots, by requesting another redirected project that *doesn't* have dots in the `path_with_namespace`, thus:\n\n```\ngl.projects.get(\"gitlab-org/gitlab-ce\")\n\u003cProject id:13083 path_with_namespace:gitlab-org/gitlab-foss\u003e\n```\n\n## Expected Behaviour\n\n`python-gitlab` should encode any dots in `Gitlab.projects.get` as `%2E` to work around the probable bug in GitLab's own API, so that `projects.get(\"redirected.project\")` will return the new project.\n\nAlthough one could argue that this is a bug in GitLab, which may or may not be the case, it's not actually documented about *how* these paths should be encoded, just that they should be \"url encoded\" (https://docs.gitlab.com/api/rest/#namespaced-paths), and encoding dots is not \"wrong\", per se. Just usually unnecessary. \n\nSecondly, we know that even if it were a bug in GitLab's API, they won't fix it for 7 years, and the workaround in `python-gitlab` would be both a valid url encoding anyway, and would enable users of this package to be redirected correctly when requesting moved projects with dots in their namespaced paths.\n\n## Actual Behaviour\n\nA 404 error is returned for an otherwise resolvable redirect when `projects.get(\"redirected.project\")` is called with a dot in the project path, as per this example.\n\n## Suggested Fix\n\nIn `gitlab.utils.EncodedId.__new__()`, updating this line works in this case, but I haven't tested whether this has any knock-on effect for anything else that calls this encoder, so I haven't raised a PR as I cannot prove that there are not regressions without more time to test. Happy to raise a PR though, if you would prefer that:\n\n```\n248        if isinstance(value, str):\n249            value = urllib.parse.quote(value, safe=\"\").replace(\".\", \"%2E\")\n\n```\n\n## Specifications\n\n  - python-gitlab version: 7.0.0\n  - Gitlab server version (or gitlab.com): gitlab.com\n","author":{"url":"https://github.com/uglybug","@type":"Person","name":"uglybug"},"datePublished":"2025-11-18T23:08:52.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":1},"url":"https://github.com/3299/python-gitlab/issues/3299"}