What are the reasons behind URLEncodedFormat() escaping valid URL characters?
valid characters:
- _ . ! ~ * " ( )
The CF8 Doc said, "[URLEncodedFormat() escapes] non-alphanumeric characters with equivalent hexadecimal escape sequences." However, why escape valid URL characters?
They are valid, but it seems pretty normal to me that if you ask a programming language to url encode a string that it converts all non alpha numeric chars to the hex equivalent.
ASP's Server.URLEncode() does the same and php urlencode() does too except for - and _. Also, in javascript, the encodeURIComponent() function will encode all non alpha numeric chars to hex equivalents.
This is a good idea anyway to encode all non alpha numeric characters when using user input for forming server requests to prevent anything unexpected from happening.
Is the encoding of valid url characters causing an error or a problem?
One issue might be that by not doing so, if you embed a link with non-encoded characters in an email, the email software may decide to break the link into two lines.
If you use a fully encoded url though, the chances of this are greatly reduced. Just one way of seeing it though.
I could see at least in the case of " that it would be nice to have it encoded when using the URL as a link in an anchor tag.