[gdal-dev] Anyone has already forgotten the /vsicurl/ prefix?

[Kirk Waters - NOAA Federal]

Having made that mistake more than once, I would be in the happy camp.

Kirk Waters, PhD
NOAA Office for Coastal Management
Applied Sciences Program
coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast




On Fri, Mar 27, 2026 at 1:08 PM Even Rouault via gdal-dev <
gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I suspect that almost every GDAL user, even the most experienced, has
> made the mistake of typing "gdalinfo https://example.com/my.tif" instead
> of "gdalinfo /vsicurl/https://example.com/my.tif". Both commands work,
> but the first one triggers the HTTP pseudo-driver which downloads the
> entire file into memory before passing it to the GeoTIFF driver, while
> the second reads it in chunks.
>
> I would be inclined to modify the GDALOpen() logic with the following
> tweak: if the passed filename starts with "http://" or "https://",
> automatically prepend "/vsicurl/", unless the string has query
> parameters. That restriction about not having query parameters is
> because in most of the cases this is for dynamically generated resources
> that don't support range requests.
>
> For users really wanting to go through the HTTP pseudo-driver, we'd
> modify it to accept a "HTTP:" prefix before the URL or it would trigger
> if using the "-if HTTP" argument of command line utilities (or
> allowed_drivers = ["HTTP"] in the API)
>
> So this change wouldn't be fully backwards compatible, but I feel it
> would still make more people happy than unhappy.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Even
>
> --
> http://www.spatialys.com
> My software is free, but my time generally not.
>
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