Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2024 March 13

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March 13

Is it possible to figure out what a URL referred to?

I got lucky. I found a photo on Facebook where the URL of the photo I can't find and the new photo both included

https://scontent-atl3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/

After that on the mystery URL are a bunch of numbers, an underscore, the letter n, a dot, and jpg. After that is a question mark followed by stp=dst-jpg_p526x296&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=c42490&_nc_ohc=IkTXZYZRFfQAX8RLql3&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.xx&oh=00_AfDtojZCc8iZapB-2hG3BZI1_MGfC2CNxVOal30R8PBuxA&oe=65D6F479

Because of the first parts of the URL being identical, it is possible I found the same photo twice, but I don't know.

I don't want to post the entire URL in either case because it came from someone's Facebook.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:38, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

In a URL, everything after ? is a query string. The format is service://host.server/path/to/resource?query&string. So, https is your service. scontent-atl3-x.xx is the host. fbcdn.net is the server. v/t39.30008-6 is the path to the resource, which is a jpg file according to your description. That is the image file. It is a jpg image file. It doesn't matter what the query string has. You've found the file. The query string is a set of variables you can use to customize some resources. Not all resources care about it. For example, an image file server might accept an image size setting in a query string. So, you can send the image as small or large. It doesn't change the resource itself. It just changes the size of the image sent. Therefore, if everything before the ? is the same, it is the same resource. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 10:44, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

The URL is a hash created by Facebook, which reports it is a "Bad URL hash". Probably, the original URL pointed to content that was later deleted.  --Lambiam 11:31, 14 March 2024 (UTC)