Should I use encodeURI or encodeURIComponent for encoding URLs

Question

Which of these two methods should be used for encoding URLs

User · Answer

xkr us has a great discussion  with examples   To quote their summary      The escape   method does not encode the   character which is   interpreted as a space on the server side as well as generated by   forms with spaces in their fields  Due to this shortcoming and the   fact that this function fails to handle non-ASCII characters   correctly  you should avoid use of escape   whenever possible  The   best alternative is usually encodeURIComponent         escape   will not encode            Use of the encodeURI   method is a bit more specialized than escape     in that it encodes for URIs as opposed to the querystring  which is   part of a URL  Use this method when you need to encode a string to be   used for any resource that uses URIs and needs certain characters to   remain un-encoded  Note that this method does not encode the     character  as it is a valid character within URIs       encodeURI   will not encode        amp                  Lastly  the encodeURIComponent   method should be used in most cases   when encoding a single component of a URI  This method will encode   certain chars that would normally be recognized as special chars for   URIs so that many components may be included  Note that this method   does not encode the   character  as it is a valid character within   URIs       encodeURIComponent   will not encode

User · Answer

encodeURIComponent     assumes that its argument is a portion  such as the protocol  hostname  path  or query string  of a URI  Therefore it escapes the punctuation characters that are used to separate the portionsof a URI   encodeURI    is used for encoding existing url

User · Answer

If you re encoding a string to put in a URL component  a querystring parameter   you should call encodeURIComponent   If you re encoding an existing URL  call encodeURI

User · Answer

As a general rule use encodeURIComponent   Don t be scared of the long name thinking it s more specific in it s use  to me it s the more commonly used method   Also don t be suckered into using encodeURI because you tested it and it appears to be encoding properly  it s probably not what you meant to use and even though your simple test using  Fred  in a first name field worked  you ll find later when you use more advanced text like adding an ampersand or a hashtag it will fail   You can look at the other answers for the reasons why this is

User · Answer

Difference between encodeURI and encodeURIComponent   encodeURIComponent value  is mainly used to encode queryString parameter values  and it encodes every applicable character in value   encodeURI ignores protocol prefix  http     and domain name     In very  very rare cases  when you want to implement manual encoding to encode additional characters  though they don t need to be encoded in typical cases  like        then you might use   function fixedEncodeURIComponent str      return encodeURIComponent str  replace       g  function c        return       c charCodeAt 0  toString 16              source

User · Answer

Here is a summary    escape   will not encode         -      Do not use it  encodeURI   will not encode A-Z a-z 0-9              amp        -                    Use it when your input is a complete URL like  https   searchexample com search q wiki  encodeURIComponent   will not encode A-Z a-z 0-9 -                 Use it when your input is part of a complete URL e g  const queryStr   encodeURIComponent someString

User · Answer

Other answers describe the purposes  Here are the characters each function will actually convert   control     x00 x01 x02 x03 x04 x05 x06 x07 x08 x09 x0A x0B x0C x0D x0E x0F              x10 x11 x12 x13 x14 X15 x16 x17 x18 x19 x1A x1B x1C x1D x1E x1F                                                                          x7F  encodeURI          control        lt  gt                                          encodeURIComponent control        lt  gt                  amp                         escape             control        lt  gt                  amp                           All characters above are converted to percent-hexadecimal codes  Space to  20  percent to  25  etc  The characters below pass through unchanged   Here are the characters the functions will NOT convert   pass thru     -  0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz   encodeURI          pass thru       amp                           encodeURIComponent pass thru                                 escape             pass thru

User · Answer

It depends on what you are actually wanting to do   encodeURI assumes that the input is a complete URI that might have some characters which need encoding in it   encodeURIComponent will encode everything with special meaning  so you use it for components of URIs such as  var world    A string with symbols  amp  characters that have special meaning    var uri    http   example com foo hello     encodeURIComponent world

[javascript] Should I use encodeURI or encodeURIComponent for encoding URLs?

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