The syntax of FTP URLs

According to the specification of URL formats, , an FTP URL is of the form

ftp://user:password@host:port/path

so that some or all of the parts user:password@, :password, :port and /path may be excluded. Although RFC 1738 has been obsoleted as regards to generic URL syntax (now defined in ), some of the specific parts, like FTP URL syntax, are still in force.

The components obey the following rules:

user

a user name (user id) on the host

password

the password corresponding to the user name; note: if the user and password field in a URL contains character : or @ or /, the character must be

host

the fully qualified domain name of a network host, or its IP address

port

the port number to connect to; it omitted, defaults to 21

path

path specification of the form
cwd₁/cwd₂/.../cwd_N/name
(where any occurrence of / or ; within a cwd_i or the name must be ) optionally followed by
;type=typecode
where typecode is one of the characters a, i, d

Effectively, ;type=a means "Ascii mode" (plain text mode) of transfer whereas ;type=i means image (binary) mode. If the ;type=typecode part of an FTP URL is omitted, the client program interpreting the URL must guess the appropriate mode to use. In general, the data content type of a file can only be guessed from the name, e.g., from the suffix of the name; the appropriate type code to be used for transfer of the file can then be deduced from the data content of the file.