java tourl_Java : File.toURI().toURL() on Windows file

That's an interesting question.

First things first: I get the same results on JRE6. I even get that when I lop off the toURL() part.

RFC2396 does not actually require two slashes. According to section 3: The URI syntax is dependent upon the scheme. In general, absolute URI are written as follows: :

Having said that, RFC2396 has been superseded by RFC3986, which states The generic URI syntax consists of a hierarchical sequence of omponents referred to as the scheme, authority, path, query, and fragment. URI = scheme ":" hier-part [ "?" query ] [ "#" fragment ] hier-part = "//" authority path-abempty / path-absolute / path-rootless / path-empty

The scheme and path components are required, though the path may be empty (no characters). When authority is present, the path must either be empty or begin with a slash ("/") character. When authority is not present, the path cannot begin with two slash characters ("//"). These restrictions result in five different ABNF rules for a path (Section 3.3), only one of which will match any given URI reference.

So, there you go. Since file URIs have no authority segment, they're forbidden from starting with //.

However, that RFC didn't come around until 2005, and Java references RFC2396, so I don't know why it's following this convention, as file URLs before the new RFC have always had two slashes.