decodeURIComponent vs unescape, what is wrong with unescape?

Question

In answering another question I became aware that my Javascript/DOM knowledge had become a bit out of date in that I am still using escape/unescape to encode the contents of URL components whereas it appears I should now be using encodeURIComponent/decodeURIComponent instead.

What I want to know is what is wrong with escape/unescape ? There are some vague suggestions that there is some sort of problem around Unicode characters, but I can't find any definite explanation.

My web experience is fairly biased, almost all of it has been writing big Intranet apps tied to Internet Explorer. That has involved a lot of use of escape/unescape and the apps involved have fully supported Unicode for many years now.

So what are the Unicode problems that escape/unescape are supposed to have ? Does anyone have any test cases to demonstrate the problems ?

Answer 1

What I want to know is what is wrong with escape/unescape ?

They're not “wrong” as such, they're just their own special string format which looks a bit like URI-parameter-encoding but actually isn't. In particular:

• ‘+’ means plus, not space
• there is a special “%uNNNN” format for encoding Unicode UTF-16 code points, instead of encoding UTF-8 bytes

So if you use escape() to create URI parameter values you will get the wrong results for strings containing a plus, or any non-ASCII characters.

escape() could be used as an internal JavaScript-only encoding scheme, for example to escape cookie values. However now that all browsers support encodeURIComponent (which wasn't originally the case), there's no reason to use escape in preference to that.

There is only one modern use for escape/unescape that I know of, and that's as a quick way to implement a UTF-8 encoder/decoder, by leveraging the UTF-8 processing in URIComponent handling:

utf8bytes= unescape(encodeURIComponent(unicodecharacters)); unicodecharacters= decodeURIComponent(escape(utf8bytes)); 

Answer 2

escape operates only on characters in the range 0 to 255 inclusive (ISO-8859-1, which is effectively unicode code points representable with a single byte). (*)

encodeURIComponent works for all strings javascript can represent (which is the whole range of unicode's basic multilingual plane, i e unicode code points 0 to 1,114,111 or 0x10FFFF that cover almost any human writing system in current use).

Both functions produce url safe strings that only use code points 0 to 127 inclusive (US-ASCII), which the latter accomplishes by first encoding the string as UTF-8 and then applying the %XX hex encoding familiar from escape, to any code point that would not be url safe.

This is incidentally why you can make a two-funcall UTF-8 encoder/decoder in javascript without any loops or garbage generation, by combining these primitives to cancel out all but the UTF-8-processing side effects, as the unescape and decodeURIComponent versions do the same in reverse.

(*) Foot note: Some modern browsers like Google Chrome have been tweaked to produce %uXXXX for the above-255 range of characters escape wasn't originally defined for, but web server support for decoding that encoding is not as well-implemented as decoding the IETF-standardized UTF-8 based encoding.