URLencode {utils}

R Documentation

Encode or Decode (partial) URLs

Description

Functions to percent-encode or decode characters in URLs.

Usage

URLencode(URL, reserved = FALSE, repeated = FALSE)
URLdecode(URL)

Arguments

URL	a character vector.
reserved	logical: should ‘reserved’ characters be encoded? See ‘Details’.
repeated	logical: should apparently already-encoded URLs be encoded again?

Details

Characters in a URL other than the English alphanumeric characters and ‘⁠- _ . ~⁠’ should be encoded as % plus a two-digit hexadecimal representation, and any single-byte character can be so encoded. (Multi-byte characters are encoded byte-by-byte.) The standard refers to this as ‘percent-encoding’.

In addition, ‘⁠! $ & ' ( ) * + , ; = : / ? @ # [ ]⁠’ are reserved characters, and should be encoded unless used in their reserved sense, which is scheme specific. The default in URLencode is to leave them alone, which is appropriate for ‘⁠file://⁠’ URLs, but probably not for ‘⁠http://⁠’ ones.

An ‘apparently already-encoded URL’ is one containing %xx for two hexadecimal digits.

Value

A character vector.

References

Internet STD 66 (formerly RFC 3986), https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/std66

Examples

(y <- URLencode("a url with spaces and / and @"))
URLdecode(y)
(y <- URLencode("a url with spaces and / and @", reserved = TRUE))
URLdecode(y)

URLdecode(z <- "ab%20cd")
c(URLencode(z), URLencode(z, repeated = TRUE)) # first is usually wanted

## both functions support character vectors of length > 1
y <- URLdecode(URLencode(c("url with space", "another one")))

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