JavaScript encodeURIComponent() Escapes "+" Symbol

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!

Short link: https://bennadel.com/564

Reader Comments

Paul Baylis Jun 30, 2013 at 7:26 AM

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.

Oh my chickens, this post is old!

Hit me up on Twitter if you want to discuss it further.