URL percent encode

[Indyandie]

Follow up to this comment

Would it be useful to have the ability to percent encode parameter values in trurl?

For example, to encode the test parameter in the URL below.

http://test.com?test=%@#$ ^&*

Maybe something like this...

trurl "http://test.com?test=%@#$ ^&*" --percentencode "{query:test}"

output

http://test.com?test=%40%23%24%25%20%5E%26%2A

I tried using the --urlencode option but got an error due to the whitespace.

trurl "http://test.com?test=%@#$ ^&*" -g "{default:url}" --urlencode

trurl note: Malformed input to a URL function [http://test.com?test=%@#$ ^&*]

And after using the --accept-space it only encoded the whitespace character.

trurl "http://test.com?test=%@#$ ^&*" -g "{default:url}" --urlencode --accept-space

http://test.com:80/?test=%@#$%20^&*

[emanuele6]

The URL was only rejected originally because because it contained a space, and you need --accept-space to make trurl accept spaces.

If you have ?foo=bar#baz then the query's foo parameter is bar. baz is not part of the query, it is the fragment of the URL.

In fact, note that if you try to normalise that URL with trurl, you will see that the space gets encoded as %20, and not +, because it is not part of the query:

$ trurl --accept-space "http://test.com?test=%@#$ ^&*"
http://test.com/?test=%@#$%20^&*

Removing the #, it becomes a + because it is actually part of the query:

$ trurl --accept-space "http://test.com?test=%@$ ^&*" 
http://test.com/?test=%@$+^&*

I do notice that % has not been encoded, which is not great, but I think that is caused by how libcurl handles URLs internally, and would need to be fixed there.

---

http://test.com?test=%40%23%24%25%20%5E%26%2A

That is not an equivalent URL though; this URL has a query with only a test parameter equal to %@$ ^&*; the original URL had a query with a test parameter equal to %@, and a fragment equal to $ ^&*. Or, if we ignore the #, this URL has a query with only a test parameter equal to %@$ ^&*, while the original URL had a query with a test parameter equal to %@$^ and a * parameter equal to empty. If you encode &s and/or #, you change the meaning of the URL.

I am trying to make sense of what you are trying to do here.
Are you perhaps writing a shell script in which you have a variable that contains a value, and you want to build a URL for test.com that contain test=thatvalue in the query, and you tried to do something like this?

var='foo%bar@$ ^&*'
trurl "https://test.com/?test=$var"

If so, that is not how you are supposed to use trurl, you should do something like this instead:

var='foo%7bar@$ ^&*'
trurl -a "query=test=$var" https://test.com/
# output: https://test.com/?test=foo%257bar%40%24%20%5e%26%2a

This will reliably set test in the query to the value $var whatever characters it contains, and without misinterpreting %7b as {.

Hopefully that helps.

o/
 emanuele6