Percentage Encoding of special characters before sending it in the URL

Question

I need to pass special characters like #,! etc in URL to Facebook,Twitter and such social sites. For that I am replacing such characters with URL Escape Codes.

 return valToEncode.Replace("!", "%21").Replace("#", "%23")
   .Replace("$", "%24").Replace("&", "%26")
   .Replace("'", "%27").Replace("(", "%28")
   .Replace(")", "%29").Replace("*", "%2A");

It works for me, but I want to do it more efficiently.Is there any other way to escape such characters? I tried with Server.URLEncode() but Facebook doesn't render it.

Thanks in advance,
Priya

Answer 1

You should use the **Uri.EscapeDataString** method if you want to have compatibility with RFC3986 standard, where percent-encoding is defined.

For example spaces always will be encoded as %20 character:

var result = Uri.EscapeDataString("a q");
// result == "a%20q"

while for example usage of HttpUtility.UrlEncode (which is by the way internally used by HttpServerUtility.UrlEncode) returns + character:

var result = HttpUtility.UrlEncode("a q") 
// result == "a+q"

What's more, the behavior of Uri.EscapeDataString is compatible with client side encodeURIComponent javascript method (except the case sensitivity, but RFC3986 says it is irrelevant).