Escaping double hyphens in Javascript?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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:

<a href="javascript:location.href=escape('resource.axd?original=test--page.html').replace(/-/g, '%2d')">Link</a>

Answer 2

You're doing something else wrong. -- is legal in URLs and filenames. Maybe the file really isn't found?

Answer 3

-- 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?

Answer 4

"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.