How to quote a forward slash in a WebClient url?

Question

I am using WebClient to connect to a data source on the web and I need to provide a user name and password. The user name can contain a forward slash. However, if this is in the connect string it does not work.

My code:

using (WebClient client = new WebClient)
{
      data = client.DownloadString("https//myURL" + userID + password)

This all works fine for a userID such as "va2fsf" but not for one containing a forward slash such as 9k/vo1dsk.
How do I handle this? I tried using %2F as in 9k%2Fvo1dsk but this doesn't work.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Use HttpUtility.UrlEncode.

data = client.DownloadString("https://myURL" + 
                              HttpUtility.UrlEncode(userID) +
                              HttpUtility.UrlEncode(password))