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POHow can one avoid illegal characters when composing a URL?
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  1. POHow can one avoid illegal characters when composing a URL?
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    copied!<p>I'm writing a web application that <em>dynamically</em> creates URL's based off of some input, to be consumed by a client at another time. For discussion sake these URL's can contain certain characters, like a <strong>forward slash (i.e. '/')</strong>, which should not be interpreted as part of the actual URL, but just as an argument. For example:</p> <pre>http://mycompany.com/PartOfUrl1/PartOfUrl2/ArgumentTo/Url/GoesHere</pre> <p>As you can see, the <strong>ArgumentTo/Url/GoesHere</strong> does indeed have forward slashes but these should be <em>ignored or escaped</em>. </p> <p>This may be a bad example but the question in hand is more general and applies to other <em>special characters</em>. </p> <h3>So, if there are pieces of a URL that are just <em>argument</em>s and should not be used to resolve the actual web request, what's a good way of handling this?</h3> <h1>Update:</h1> <p>Given some of the answers I realized that I failed to point out a few pieces that hopefully will help clarify. </p> <p>I would like to keep this fairly language agnostic as it would be great if the client could just make a request. For example, if the client knew that it wanted to pass <strong>ArgumentTo/Url/GoesHere</strong>, it would be great if that could be <em>encoded</em> into a <em>unique</em> string in which the server could turn around and <em>decode</em> it to use. </p> <p>Can we assume that similar functions like HttpUtility.HtmlEncode/HtmlDecode in the .NET Framework are available on other systems/platforms? The URL does not have to be <em>pretty</em> by any means so having <em>real words</em> in the path does not really matter.</p> <h3>Would something like a base64 encoding of the argument work?</h3> <p>It seems that base64 encoding/decoding is fairly readily available on any platform/language. </p>
 

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