POSTs that contain a semicolon are cut off after semicolon

Question

If I have a POST parameter of

d={"data": "<span>hello</span>"}

which is a JSON string and it works fine and request.POST.get('d') contains the full string. But if I change it to

d = {"data": "<span>hel;lo</span>"}
print (request.POST.get('d')) #prints '{"data": "<span>hel'

For some reason anything after a semicolon is cut off. I can confirm this is not Javascript doing this because I used to use the exact same javascript code to post to a PHP API which was able to retrieve the data. Since moving to Python and webapp2 I've had this issue.

Answer 1

Run your string through encodeURIComponent(). Then components that truncate would be encoded. Afterwards when retrieving the data you need to decode.

Answer 2

This depends on the Content-Type of the request. If content type is application/x-www-form-urlencoded then you need to urlencode the params. See first answer for a detailed explanation: application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data?