I just thought this was odd, and may be exploited in cases where a security filter checks the string before the conversion takes place.

Here are the results of the DOM parsing for "file://c|/foo/bar".  Internet Explorer and Google Chrome both convert the "|" to the ":" in the path component.  Windows actually treats the "|" as a ":" in the path, which may also seem odd, but then why would these browsers feel the need to convert the character?

Test Cases
================

file://c|/foo/bar

c|/foo/bar


Results
================

RawUrl                                           Browser
file:///c:/foo/bar                        MSIE 7.0
file:///C:/foo/bar                       Chrome/12.0.742.100
file:///c|/foo/bar                       Firefox/4.0.1
file://c|/foo/bar                         Safari/5.05
file://localhost/c|/foo/bar    Opera/9.80

I can understand being liberal in accepting "|" characters in the path segment, even though RFC3986 and 3987bis would have you percent-encode it to "%7C".  But I didn't realize that IE and Chrome would actually perform a transformation on the input in this way.