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Ben Nadel at cf.Objective() 2017 (Washington, D.C.) with: Ryan Nibert
Ben Nadel at cf.Objective() 2017 (Washington, D.C.) with: Ryan Nibert

JavaScript encodeURIComponent() Escapes "+" Symbol

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I just blogged about how I was going to have to manually escape the "+" symbol when passing values from my AJAX web page to my ColdFusion back end, but I just happened upon a Javascript method that I have never seen before:

encodeURIComponent()

According to http://xkr.us/articles/javascript/encode-compare/, this method was introduced in Javascript 1.5. Here is a small description from the site:

Lastly, the encodeURIComponent() method should be used in most cases when encoding a single component of a URI. This method will encode certain chars that would normally be recognized as special chars for URIs so that many components may be included. Note that this method does not encode the ' character, as it is a valid character within URIs.

This seems to do the trick. Sweet-ass find!

Reader Comments

21 Comments

Just used this to pass JSON through the URL. Dumped URL scope on the receiving page and get something looking like this:

{"street_number":32,"viewport":"","administrative_area_level_1":"Auckland","country_short":"NZ","route":"Vialou Ln"}

Wondering how to work with this data, i.e. if there's an easy way to parse the separate variables out into useable format without a lot of list functions and suchlike.

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Ben Nadel