[FIXED] What does colon ':' in API request mean?

Issue

i am using firebase for my project ,the documentation gives me the endpoint for signing in users as:

https://identitytoolkit.googleapis.com/v1/accounts:signInWithPassword?key=[API_KEY]

i want to know what does the colon : mean, for example the word key after the question mark shows its a parameter likewise what does the notion accounts:signInWithPassword mean.The reason:I have an axios instance with config:

axios.create(
  {
    baseURL:"https://identitytoolkit.googleapis.com/v1",
    params:{
    apiKey:"somekey"
    }
  })

now since the baseUrl shown above remains same for firebase signing in with email and password or signing up with email and password. I want to dynamically embed accounts:signInWithPassword and accounts:signUp for respective requests and i am not sure if specifying accounts:respectiveUsecase in params object would work.

Solution

A colon doesn't have any special meaning in an URL path. It's just a convention those APIs tend to use in their paths.

There are a handful of metacharacters that do:

• question marks (?) and hashes (#) delimit the query or search parts
• % is used for escaping characters (e.g. %0A)
• + is sometimes an encoding for a space instead of %20.
• & generally separates query parameters (e.g. foo=bar&baz), though this is not a part of the standard. Some server software could expect e.g. semicolon-separated parameters.

As @deceze pointed out, colons do have a special meaning in the host part, e.g. https://user:pass@host/path:where:colons:do:not:matter.

Answered By - AKX

Answer Checked By - Robin (PHPFixing Admin)