File.publicUrl() unexpectedly escapes forward slashes in > 7.6.0

[Jeanno]

Summary

Forward slashes are escaped to "%2F" in File.publicUrl() for files that are > 1 level deep.

Unexpected result: "https://storage.googleapis.com/bucketId/path%2Fto%2Ffile"
Expected result: "https://storage.googleapis.com/bucketId/path/to/file"

The expected result is given before <= 6.5.4. So this issue looks like a regression.

Environment details

• @google-cloud/storage version: > 7.6.0

Steps to reproduce

1. Run the example code. This can also be reproduced in npm's runkit. (https://npm.runkit.com/%40google-cloud%2Fstorage)

var Storage = require("@google-cloud/storage")

var storage = new Storage.Storage();
var bucket = storage.bucket('bucketId');
var file = bucket.file('path/to/file');
var url = file.publicUrl();

Unexpected result: "https://storage.googleapis.com/bucketId/path%2Fto%2Ffile"
Expected result: "https://storage.googleapis.com/bucketId/path/to/file"

Additional info

There was an identical bug in the python library.
googleapis/google-cloud-python#3809

[ddelgrosso1]

Thanks for reporting this issue @Jeanno. This code path hasn't changed in some time so I am wondering if perhaps something changed on the node side. Did you recently change versions? Can you provide me with the version you are currently using?

[h-auzian]

I can confirm that I have the same problem on my end using Node 20.

I noticed that the last version without the problem is 5.18.2. From 5.18.3 onwards, the forward slashes / are shown as %2F.

== 5.18.2: https://storage.googleapis.com/my-bucket/my-folder/my-file.csv
>= 5.18.3: https://storage.googleapis.com/my-bucket/my-folder%2Fmy-file.csv

[Jeanno]

Thanks for reporting this issue @Jeanno. This code path hasn't changed in some time so I am wondering if perhaps something changed on the node side. Did you recently change versions? Can you provide me with the version you are currently using?

I didn't change my node version (for at least a few months). The issue broken my production which I had to roll back immediately.

My development node version: node 21
Production node version: node 20. Docker image is node:20-slim to be exact.

[ddelgrosso1]

I can confirm that I have the same problem on my end using Node 20.

I noticed that the last version without the problem is 5.18.2. From 5.18.3 onwards, the forward slashes / are shown as %2F.

== 5.18.2: https://storage.googleapis.com/my-bucket/my-folder/my-file.csv >= 5.18.3: https://storage.googleapis.com/my-bucket/my-folder%2Fmy-file.csv

Excellent thank you @HAuzian this will help me track down what happened.

[ddelgrosso1]

See my original note #1824 (comment). Is this encoding causing an issue or is it just a readability problem as noted in this issue?

[h-auzian]

@ddelgrosso1, thanks for linking the note providing context. The change makes perfect sense.

At least in my case, the result from File.publicUrl() was .split("/") for further processing, and that was the part that broke, but it seems to be an easy fix on my end 👍

[Jeanno]

See my original note #1824 (comment). Is this encoding causing an issue or is it just a readability problem as noted in this issue?

It took down my services in production as URLs from GCS are split by "/". I wrote my workaround so it's fine for me for now.

I'm sure there will be a lot of similar cases out there so when they upgrade their dependencies it will again cause some outages.

[ddelgrosso1]

Being as this appears to be working as intended. Going to close this issue out. If there are any other questions or concerns, please feel free to reopen / open a new issue.

[Jeanno]

Hi @ddelgrosso1 thanks for taking a look at this. But I still think the resolution contradicts with the object naming guideline that you referenced to in the other issue.

For example, if you create an object named folder1/file.txt in the bucket your-bucket, the path to the object is your-bucket/folder1/file.txt, and Cloud Storage has no folder named folder1 stored within it. From the perspective of Cloud Storage, the string folder1/ is part of the object's name.

And specifically,

The / character [...] is typically OK to use in object names for mimicking a directory structure

On the other hand, the public urls shown on Google Cloud Console are https://storage.googleapis.com/BUCKET_ID/path/to/file instead of having encoded slashes.

Given the above, I think the change does not make sense to me. Perhaps I'm missing something here but would appreciate if someone could point that out for me.