Section 24.73. encodeURIComponent( ): escape characters in a URI component

24.73. encodeURIComponent( ): escape characters in a URI component

ECMAScript v3

24.73.1. Synopsis

 encodeURIComponent(s) 

24.73.1.1. Arguments

s

A string that contains a portion of a URI or other text to be encoded.

24.73.1.2. Returns

A copy of s, with certain characters replaced by hexadecimal escape sequences.

24.73.1.3. Throws

URIError

Indicates that s contains malformed Unicode surrogate pairs and cannot be encoded.

24.73.2. Description

encodeURIComponent( ) is a global function that returns an encoded copy of its s argument. ASCII letters and digits are not encoded, nor are the following ASCII punctuation characters:

 - _ . ! ~ * ' ( ) 

All other characters, including punctuation characters such as /, :, and # that serve to separate the various components of a URI, are replaced with one or more hexadecimal escape sequences. See encodeURI( ) for a description of the encoding scheme used.

Note the difference between encodeURIComponent( ) and encodeURI( ): encodeURIComponent( ) assumes that its argument is a portion (such as the protocol, hostname, path, or query string) of a URI. Therefore it escapes the punctuation characters that are used to separate the portions of a URI.

24.73.3. Example

 encodeURIComponent("hello world?");  // Returns hello%20world%3F 

24.73.4. See Also

decodeURI( ), decodeURIComponent( ), encodeURI( ), escape( ), unescape( )