file url question

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

Dear all,

just a quick question regarding url formats for a local file. I
encountered problems when using browse-url to view a local file. Looking
into it, it seems that the format of the url being passed to browse-url
may be incorrect and I wanted to see whether others agreed and therefore
if it should be posted to the emacs dev group as a bug. 

Browse url uses the variable browse-url-filename-alist to work out how
to transform certain filenames into a standard url format. In this
alist, the entry for local files is 

("^/+" . "file:/")

This doesn't look right to me. I changed it to be 

 ("^/+" . "file://")

and the problem I was getting with handling local files appears to be
fixed. 

This problem seems to have appeared after a recent upgrade of
w3m-el . I'm running Debian unstable and emacs from cvs (GNU Emacs
23.0.92.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.14.7) of 2009-04-13 on
lion) and the w3m-el-snapshot package (Version: 1.4.344+0.20090405-1). 

My guess is that recent changes in w3m-el have made it a little more
strict on how it handles local file URLs. There is a note that the
function that processes local files has been updated to include files of
the format file://c:/ in addition to file:///c:/. However, this is just
a guess. 

Regardless of this change, it would seem to me that the correct mapping
in browse-url-fl\ilename-alist should be 'file://' rather than
'file:/'. 

Is my reasoning correct or is there something I'm overlooking? Just
wanted to get others opinion prior to logging a bug report. 

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au