jQuery $.post - do I have to encode the URL parameter?

Question

I'm making an AJAX call with $.post(url, cb). The URL I'm passing in could potentially have weird characters like spaces, &, ? and so on.

Do I have to use $.post(encodeURIComponent(url), cb)?

url is something like /foo/weird-char§.

Answer 1

Do I have to use $.post(encodeURIComponent(url), cb)?

You will have to use encodeURIComponent() but not on the entire URI, only on the data part (weird and chars in your example). The URL and the ? & separating the parameters must stay intact. If you encode the entire URI, it will become unusable.

If you would add the data as POST data using the data parameter:

url = "/foo/possible";
$.post(url, { "weird": "f2(90§§$", "chars": "ß1028490" });

jQuery's Ajax functions would take care of URL encoding the data automatically.

Answer 2

Yes, you would need to encode the keys and values in the query string (but not the ? which separates the path from the query arguments and the & which separates the query arguments). This is built into jQuery if you use the data parameter of the $.post, like so:

$.post(url, { name: "John", time: "2pm" }, cb);