How do I raw URL encode/decode in JavaScript and Ruby to get the same values in both?

Question

I am working on a web application where I have to encode and decode a string at the JavaScript side and Ruby backend of the code. the only problem is that the escape methods for JavaScript and Ruby have a small difference. in JavaScript the " " is treated as "%20" but in ruby the " " is encoded to "+".

Any way to solve this? Another Ruby method to encode a string in raw URL encode?

After some Selenium testing I noticed that for some reason the URI.unescape mixes up between the "£" and the "?". If I use encodeURIComponent("£"); in JavaScript and then URI.unescape("%C2%A3") in Ruby which is the value we get when we encode the "£" sign, I get the "?" sign returned. Any solution?

Answer 1

Use

URI.escape(foo, Regexp.new("[^#{URI::PATTERN::UNRESERVED}]"))

in ruby, and

encodeURIComponent(foo); 

in javascript

Both these will behave equally and encode space as %20.

Answer 2

In URL encoding, both + and %20 represent a space, so even though one may encode the space into a + and the other into a %20, they should both happily decode either back into a space.

Javascript has a couple of different functions for encoding things for transmission; the best one to use is encodeURIComponent, which encodes each component of a URI. Like so:

var name = /* ...get the name from somewhere, perhaps a form field... */;
var queryString = "?name=" + encodeURIComponent(name);

This is better than the previous encodeURI function (and several people mistakenly think that escape does this, but it doesn't; it does something else entirely which is of fairly limited use).