They generally contain three slashes, because you take a file path that starts with a slash (such as /etc/passwd) and then add the file:// to the beginning, so you get file:///etc/passwd. The vertical bar is what windows uses in place of :, since the : has a different meaning in a URI, so C:\foo.txt becomes file://C|/foo.txt.

In reply to Re: syntax for URI of files? by jasonk
in thread syntax for URI of files? by John M. Dlugosz

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