URL Escaping

electronicMacks has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fellow monks:

I’m writing a script that (among other things) converts strings to URL encoded format. I’ve been using uri_escape from URI::Escape which works great for some characters (like spaces) but does not, by default, escape characters such as & and ; although it is possile to turn on each of these characters individualy, I can't shake the feeling that there must be a better way...

So, my question is, can anyone recommend a good module that will encode all non alphanumeric characters? How about all but : and /

A humble monk,
electronicMacks

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(Ovid encoding URLs)Re: URL Escaping by Ovid (Cardinal) on Dec 28, 2000 at 03:47 UTC
The function `uri_escape` takes an optional second argument that's a list of all characters that you want to encode. The following should work for you: `#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use URI::Escape; my $cgi_chars = '\x00-\x29\x2b\x2c\x2f\x3a-\x40\x5b-\x5e\x60\x7b-\xff +'; my $bad_chars = '^%$&='; print uri_escape( $bad_chars, $cgi_chars );` [download] Cheers, Ovid Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: URL Escaping by eg (Friar) on Dec 28, 2000 at 03:33 UTC
How about `CGI::escape()`? It translates everything except [a-zA-Z0-9_.-]. If it doesn't do what you want, you can always grab the four or five line definition out of CGI.pm and customize it for your needs.	[reply]
Re: URL Escaping by merlyn (Sage) on Dec 28, 2000 at 06:02 UTC
It's not supposed to escape those because those are legal characters in a URL. (Didn't we do this one already?) There's nothing wrong with a URL of `http://www.stonehenge.comm/cgi/foobar/fred&barney` [download] That doesn't mean that fred or barney are query parameters. The ampersand is only of some significance after the question mark. If you want to build a query string from pieces, use the proper part of URI... the parts with the word `query` in them. Stop trying to use the wrong tool for the wrong job in the wrong way. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply] [d/l]


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