ASP.Net MVC 2.0 : unescaping URL query parameters

Question

I have following URL:

http://localhost:8041/Reforge.aspx?name=Cyan%ECde&realmId=1

notice %EC in the value of name parameter.

%EC = 236 = ì (igrave)

In my action method:

public ActionResult Index(string name, int realmId) {...}

name[4] is a character with code 65533 (0xFFFD). What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

This will depend on the globalization element in web.config:

<globalization requestEncoding="iso-8859-1" />

Or if your site is UTF-8

<globalization requestEncoding="utf-8" />

But in this case the url needs to look like name=Cyan%c3%acde. You should always use URL helpers to generate urls so that they are properly encoded.

Answer 2

HttpUtility.UrlDecode("%EC") gives that character (65533) as its output.

HttpUtility.UrlEncode("ì") produces "%c3%ac"

How are you generating this %EC? It looks like your encoding isn't working as ASP.NET is expecting

UPDATE

You say that you're just entering http://localhost:8041/Reforge.aspx?name=Cyanìde&realmId=1 into your browser and that it's not encoding correctly. I would suggest that you shouldn't be entering that into your browser in the first place. If you're generating that URL, you need to encode it (so that it renders as <a href="http://localhost:8041/Reforge.aspx?name=Cyan%c3%acde&realmId=1">). Firefox will show this with the ì when hovering over, but will give the encoded version when clicked or copied.

If users are typing arbitrary unicode into a URL, there's not a good way for you to handle that (since they're effectually sending you invalid requests).

Answer 3

Some things I can find:

HttpServerUtility.UrlDecode(your param)

HttpUtility.UrlDecode(your param)

Server.UrlDecode(your param)

Any of these working for you?

Answer 4

I faced a similar problem with url encoding (ì must be encoded as %EC to work) in ASP.NET and js.

If you set <globalization requestEncoding="ISO-8859-1" responseEncoding="ISO-8859-1" \> in system.web node, you must use HttpContext.Current.Server.UrlEncode to urlencode \ decode cause in this way you are using globalization settings in web.config.

Before using UrlEncode in current HttpContext I was using HttpUtility.UrlDecode that doesn't use current globalization settings.

Worked for me!