I faced the encoding half of this problem the other day. Unhappy with the available options, and after taking a look at this C sample code, i decided to roll my own C++ url-encode function:
#include <cctype>
#include <iomanip>
#include <sstream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
string url_encode(const string &value) {
ostringstream escaped;
escaped.fill('0');
escaped << hex;
for (string::const_iterator i = value.begin(), n = value.end(); i != n; ++i) {
string::value_type c = (*i);
// Keep alphanumeric and other accepted characters intact
if (isalnum(c) || c == '-' || c == '_' || c == '.' || c == '~') {
escaped << c;
continue;
}
// Any other characters are percent-encoded
escaped << uppercase;
escaped << '%' << setw(2) << int((unsigned char) c);
escaped << nouppercase;
}
return escaped.str();
}
The implementation of the decode function is left as an exercise to the reader. :P