I am currently working on a personal project, where I have to deal with some chemical formulas;
I have a form with JavaScript where I enter these formulas; The formulas are entered in a LaTeX-like style for super- en subscript.
An example formula can be found below:
Fe^{3+}
When I use JavaScript to read the form and console.log(); the formula is working as expected.
However if I send the formula to the back-end (Python with CGI), the + character seems to have disappeared and been replaced with a space.
I thought it had something to do with escaping the character, since parts of the formula look a lot like regex's, but after looking around, I couldn't find anything that would suggest that I had to escape the + character.
And now I have absolutely no idea how to resolve this... I could use a different character and replace it on the back-end but that seems like it is not the optimal solution...
Most important question: How did you invoke the CGI script?
With HTTP GET or HTTP POST?
If you're using HTTP POST and the data was being transferred in the HTTP Data portion, then you don't need to escape the "+" sign.
But if you're using HTTP GET, then the "+" sign will first be translated according to URL encoding standard (thus, "+" becomes a space), before transferred to the CGI script.
So in the latter scenario, you need to escape the "+" sign (and other 'special' characters such as "%" and "?").
I have the need to store the first half of a URL inside a variable which will be used later when running other commands. Does anyone know a method to extract the first part of the URL and ignore everything after the delimiter ?
I was thinking something similar to this but instead of storing everything after the delimiter, store the value before.
javascript{storedVars['MyVariable'].split('=')[storedVars['delimiter']]}
The format of the URL is similar to the following...
mywebsite.ca/cms/One.aspx?objectId=145655&contextId=1320565&parentId=1274179
The desired result would be to store
mywebsite.ca/cms/One.aspx?objectId=145655 inside a variable.
Update:
I was able to solve my problem by referencing this post
Extract part of a text with selenium IDE and put it into variable
Thank you
javascript{storedVars['MyVariable'].split('&')[0]}
I think this is what you want. This will split on the parameters (&) but allow you to capture the capture "mywebsite.ca/cms/One.aspx?objectId=145655" from "mywebsite.ca/cms/One.aspx?objectId=145655&contextId=1320565&parentId=1274179"
You might be well served by reading this: Break a URL into its components
I am trying to pass the parameter value to a drill through report in SSSRS. The value i have to pass is a field that i get using MDX and the value is like [F&B]. While i tried to pass the value as usual, it showed an error. Then i could realize that the issue is with the special character "&". I tried replacing it with %26 also. It worked fine when i directly pasted the url in the browser but failed when i implemented it in the Action Expresion.
Thanks for the help in advance.
Make sure you URLEncode your parameters.
I believe the ASP function is Server.URLEncode
[ and ] will probably get encoded as well.
The SO post below is comprehensive, but all three methods described fail to encode for periods.
Post: Encode URL in JavaScript?
For instance, if I run the three methods (i.e., escape, encodeURI, encodeURIComponent), none of them encode periods.
So "food.store" comes out as "food.store," which breaks the URL. It breaks the URL because the Rails app cannot recognize the URL as valid and displays the 404 error page. Perhaps it's a configuration mistake in the Rails routes file?
What's the best way to encode periods with Javascript for URLs?
I know this is an old thread, but I didn't see anywhere here any examples of URLs that were causing the original problem. I encountered a similar problem myself a couple of days ago with a Java application. In my case, the string with the period was at the end of the path element of the URL eg.
http://myserver.com/app/servlet/test.string
In this case, the Spring library I'm using was only passing me the 'test' part of that string to the relevant annotated method parameter of my controller class, presumably because it was treating the '.string' as a file extension and stripping it away. Perhaps this is the same underlying issue with the original problem above?
Anyway, I was able to workaround this simply by adding a trailing slash to the URL. Just throwing this out there in case it is useful to anybody else.
John
Periods shouldn't break the url, but I don't know how you are using the period, so I can't really say. None of the functions I know of encode the '.' for a url, meaning you will have to use your own function to encode the '.' .
You could base64 encode the data, but I don't believe there is a native way to do that in js. You could also replace all periods with their ASCII equivalent (%2E) on both the client and server side.
Basically, it's not generally necessary to encode '.', so if you need to do it, you'll need to come up with your own solution. You may want to also do further testing to be sure the '.' will actually break the url.
hth
I had this same problem where my .htaccess was breaking input values with .
Since I did not want to change what the .htaccess was doing I used this to fix it:
var val="foo.bar";
var safevalue=encodeURIComponent(val).replace(/\./g, '%2E');
this does all the standard encoding then replaces . with there ascii equivalent %2E. PHP automatically converts back to . in the $_REQUEST value but the .htaccess doesn't see it as a period so things are all good.
Periods do not have to be encoded in URLs. Here is the RFC to look at.
If a period is "breaking" something, it may be that your server is making its own interpretation of the URL, which is a fine thing to do of course but it means that you have to come up with some encoding scheme of your own when your own metacharacters need escaping.
I had the same question and maybe my solution can help someone else in the future.
In my case the url was generated using javascript. Periods are used to separate values in the url (sling selectors), so the selectors themselves weren't allowed to have periods.
My solution was to replace all periods with the html entity as is Figure 1:
Figure 1: Solution
var urlPart = 'foo.bar';
var safeUrlPart = encodeURIComponent(urlPart.replace(/\./g, '.'));
console.log(safeUrlPart); // foo%26%2346%3Bbar
console.log(decodeURIComponent(safeUrlPart)); // foo.bar
I had problems with .s in rest api urls. It is the fact that they are interpreted as extensions which in it's own way makes sense. Escaping doesn't help because they are unescaped before the call (as already noted). Adding a trailing / didn't help either. I got around this by passing the value as a named argument instead. e.g. api/Id/Text.string to api/Id?arg=Text.string. You'll need to modify the routing on the controller but the handler itself can stay the same.
If its possible using a .htaccess file would make it really cool and easy. Just add a \ before the period. Something like:\.
It is a rails problem, see Rails REST routing: dots in the resource item ID for an explanation (and Rails routing guide, Sec. 3.2)
You shouldn't be using encodeURI() or encodeURIComponent() anyway.
console.log(encodeURIComponent('%^&*'));
Input: %^&*. Output: %25%5E%26*. So, to be clear, this doesn't convert *. Hopefully you know this before you run rm * after "cleansing" that input server-side!
Luckily, MDN gave us a work-around to fix this glaring problem, fixedEncodeURI() and fixedEncodeURIComponent(), which is based on this regex: [!'()*]. (Source: MDN Web Docs: encodeURIComponent().) Just rewrite it to add in a period and you'll be fine:
function fixedEncodeURIComponent(str) {
return encodeURIComponent(str).replace(/[\.!'()*]/g, function(c) {
return '%' + c.charCodeAt(0).toString(16);
});
}
console.log(fixedEncodeURIComponent('hello.'));
I have a Javascript bookmarklet that, when clicked on, redirects the user to a new webpage and supplies the URL of the old webpage as a parameter in the query string.
I'm running into a problem when the original webpage has a double hyphen in the URL (ex. page--1--of--3.html). Stupid, I know - I can't control the original page The javascript escape function I'm using does not escape the hyphen, and IIS 6 gives a file not found error if asked to serve resource.aspx?original=page--1--of--3.html
Is there an alternative javascript escape function I can use? What is the best way to solve this problem? Does anybody know why IIS chokes on resource.aspx?original=page--1 and not page-1?
"escape" and "unescape" are deprecated precisely because it doesn't encode all the relevant characters. DO NOT USE ESCAPE OR UNESCAPE. use "encodeURIComponent" and "decodeURIComponent" instead. Supported in all but the oldest most decrepit browsers. It's really a huge shame this knowledge isn't much more common.
(see also encodeURI and decodeURI)
edit: err just tested, but this doesn't really cover the double hyphens still. Sorry.
Can you expand the escape function with some custom logic to encode the hypen's manually?
resource.aspx?original=page%2d%2d1%2d%2dof%2d%2d3.html
Something like this:
function customEscape(url) {
url = escape(url);
url = url.replace(/-/g, '%2d');
return url;
}
location.href = customEscape("resource.axd?original=test--page.html");
Update, for a bookmarklet:
Link
You're doing something else wrong. -- is legal in URLs and filenames. Maybe the file really isn't found?
-- is used to comment out text in a few scripting languages. SQL Server uses it to add comments. Do you use any database logic to store those filenames? Or create any queries where this name is part of the query string instead of using query parameters?