gopher-protocol

An implementation of Gopher (gopher://, port 70) and its Gopher+ successor in Rust: an async client, an RFC 1436 menu parser with RFC 4266 URL synthesis, and the Gopher+ attribute, view, and form model.

This is not the reference implementation of Gopher, and it does not speak for the protocol's community.

Gopher+

Gopher+ (1993) is an upward-compatible superset, so it is not a separate protocol here: a plain RFC 1436 menu just has no Gopher+ markers on its items. What it adds is a response header carrying a real length, attribute blocks (+INFO, +ADMIN, +VIEWS) that describe an item without fetching it, alternate representations, and +ASK forms for interactive queries.

Gopher-II (the later draft) is not implemented.

Two halves, separately usable

The parsers have no dependencies and are always compiled, Gopher+ included. A consumer that only renders gophermaps takes the crate without the client and pulls no async runtime:

gopher-protocol = { version = "0.1", default-features = false }

The client rides the default client feature, and a server rides the off-by-default server feature: it reads all three request fields, so one handler answers both RFC 1436 and Gopher+ callers, and the Gopher+ length header is written for you.

Example

# async fn run() -> Result<(), gopher_protocol::ClientError> {
let reply = gopher_protocol::fetch("gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/").await?;
for item in gopher_protocol::parse_menu(&String::from_utf8_lossy(&reply.body)) {
    println!("{:?} {}", item.kind, item.display);
}
# Ok(())
# }

Scope

A client and a parser. It does not serve gopher, and it holds no document or render model: how a Search or Image item should look is the consumer's decision.

Gopher carries no status line and no MIME type, so Response::mime is a best-effort inference from the item type, documented as a client convention rather than part of the RFC.

License