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

[ky]

Same confusion for me, even worse when you start chaining vsis, a /vsis3
with /vsizip for example, which should come first?
if we can read a zip over a storage, maybe we should just read it without
too much docs readings?

On Fri, Mar 27, 2026 at 4:45 PM Scott via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
wrote:

> Embarrassingly, I've caught myself looking into the documentation for
> /vsihttp/ on more than one occasion. It might be cool to have it,
> possibly with its own set of --co options.
>
> But, yeah, the new default action you outlined sounds good!
>
> Scott
>
> On 3/27/26 10:08, Even Rouault via gdal-dev 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
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> gdal-dev mailing list
> gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/attachments/20260327/b65deeb2/attachment.htm>