how do I properly encode a URL in JavaScript?

Question

I am working on a browser plugin that takes the URL of the current page or any selected link as a parameter and send it to our server. When characters of the basic latin alphabet are present in the url (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle), the plugin works fine. However, when the URL contains characters from another alphabet such as http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Коляска the plugin does not work, I do use the encodeURIComponentmethod but that does not seem to solve the issue. Any idea?

Thanks,

Olivier.

ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Коляска is not really a valid URL. When you enter that into a modern browser, it will URLEncode the characters automatically. Can you explain in more detail what you are doing, where the data is coming from, and what encodeURIComponent does that doesn't suit? Also, what do you mean by "browser plugin" exactly? — Pekka
– Pekka, Commented Sep 14, 2010 at 19:20
Background: stackoverflow.com/questions/2742852/unicode-characters-in-urls — Pekka
– Pekka, Commented Sep 14, 2010 at 19:21

Brian Campbell · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-14 20:12:09Z

1

You probably want to use encodeURI/decodeURI, if you are trying to take a full URI with non-ASCII characters and translate it into its encoded form. These preserve special URI characters, such as : and /, instead of escaping them; it only escapes non-ASCII characters and characters that are invalid in URIs. Thus, they do essentially the same thing as typing in the address bar or putting a URI in an <a href="..."> (though the behavior might vary somewhat between browser, and isn't exactly the same).

encodeURIComponent is intended for encoding only a single component of a URI, replacing special characters that are meaningful in URIs, so that you can use the component as a query parameter or path component in a longer URI.

edited Sep 14, 2010 at 20:12

answered Sep 14, 2010 at 19:36

Brian Campbell

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Brandon J. Boone · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-14 19:21:28Z

0

This one says it covers UTF-8. http://www.webtoolkit.info/javascript-url-decode-encode.html. Might solve your problem

answered Sep 14, 2010 at 19:21

Brandon J. Boone

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