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Comment by jarin | Hacker News Reader

If you want to curl a hashbang URL (or access its content in some other non-Javascript-requiring way), there's a pretty easy way to do it. Just do the same thing Google does and remove the hashbang. It's like getting mad because you can't parse the XML you find at a JSON endpoint.

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"If you want to curl a hashbang URL (or access its content in some other non-Javascript-requiring way), there's a pretty easy way to do it. Just do the same thing Google does and remove the hashbang."

Which command line option on curl does that? (Maybe they haven't updated the man page? http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html ).

Oh, if you reply, could you do it in the form of interpretative dance.

sed 's/#!\///g' urls.txt | xargs curl

Yeah, not that hard dude.

> sed 's/#!\///g' urls.txt | xargs curl

So easy, you've actually got it wrong.

Certain special characters after the hash-bang need to be url-encoded, and then that value needs to be added to what's before the #! by including a query string parameter of _escaped_fragment_, checking first whether there is already a query string so as to append the information rather than incorrectly whacking on a '?'.

Plus, this isn't in the form of interpretive dance. So no content for you.

Ok fine, so it will take 10 minutes to whip up and test a quick Ruby script instead of 30 seconds to think of the regular expression. I stand corrected.

Now multiply that 10 minutes by number of scripts, utilities, libraries and applications in the world that handle URLs, and you'll be somewhere close to the magnitude of effort required to work around these broken URLs.

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