Are query string keys case sensitive?

Question

Suppose I have a url like this:

http://www.example.com?key=123&KEY=198

Then what will be result of

request.querystring("key")

and 

request.querystring("KEY")

I am a bit confused.

Answer 1

The RFC for URIs says:

6.2.2.1. Case Normalization

When a URI uses components of the generic syntax, the component syntax equivalence rules always apply; namely, that the scheme and host are case-insensitive and therefore should be normalized to lowercase. For example, the URI is equivalent to http://www.example.com/.

The other generic syntax components are assumed to be case-sensitive unless specifically defined otherwise by the scheme (see Section 6.2.3).

Note that scheme ("http" here), host (server name) are case-insensitive but should be in lowercase anyway. The rest is case-sensitive unless you're using a different scheme that explicitly says it should be insensitive.

So key and KEY are different things in all http-based URIs according to the spec.

Edit: @Nicholas is partly wrong in assuming that the authority defines what it accepts, that's true for custom schemes and authorities that define their own URIs, but http is a well-defined spec that everyone conforms to (or you could have http queries that have, say, the pipe character as a delimiter. Imagine the chaos there!)

the RFC spec for HTTP says:

The scheme and host are case-insensitive and normally provided in lowercase; all other components are compared in a case-sensitive manner. Characters other than those in the "reserved" set are equivalent to their percent-encoded octets: the normal form is to not encode them (see Sections 2.1 and 2.2 of [RFC3986]).

So the query part of the URI as defined by the spec for the HTTP scheme is case-sensitive. If Microsoft has a case-insensitive parser for query strings, its not conforming to the spec. Not that I guess this level of pickiness really matters much.