Perl URL encoding .. problems with # in URL

Question

I have a URL that with spaces and # in it that I escape using URI::Escape to get the following.

https://copy.com/1rsdM7TvVcLfGebc/name%20with%20space%20and%20%23%20in%20it.jpg?

Note: In the original page from where I copied the above clicking the link doesn't work. The HTML from that page is shown here.

<a href=3D"https://copy.com/1rsdM7TvVcLfGebc/name%20with%20space%20and%20%23=
%20in%20it.jpg?source=3Dbsf" style=3D"color: white; font-weight: =
bold;">name with space and # in it.jpg</a>

As you can see # is correctly encoded as %23. The problem is when I click the link the browsers don't retain it as %23 but encode it to # and prevent me from taking to the destination. This is how the link looks in the browser. You can see that after # the spaces are not rendered as %20 either. The behavior is different in other browsers and none of them works.

https://www.copy.com/s/1rsdM7TvVcLfGebc/name%20with%20space%20and%20# in it.jpg

When I manually replace # with %23 in the browser and push enter it correctly takes me to the page.

What's going on here?

why is there 3D before the quotes? Otherwise the url looks fine. — jfs
– jfs, Commented Apr 17, 2013 at 9:10
This is QP encoding used in MIME, it looks like Mir neglected to properly decode an email message. — daxim
– daxim, Commented Apr 17, 2013 at 9:17
The URI in the HTML snipped does not match the URI you're actually trying to reach, containing as it does extraneous spaces and =s. As @daxim suggests, one of your previous transcoding steps was bungled. — darch
– darch, Commented Apr 22, 2013 at 22:11

daxim · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-17 09:26:53Z

1

Not a Perl problem. The redirect on the Web host is broken! Compare:

answered Apr 17, 2013 at 9:26

daxim

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Comments

Popeye · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-17 05:32:12Z

0

Don't rely on its automatic URL encoding. You can force your URLs to encode/decode every time you need to use them.

You can use uri_escape() and uri_unescape() functions for this purpose.

answered Apr 17, 2013 at 5:32

Popeye

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