encodeURIComponent

The encodeURIComponent() function encodes a URI by replacing each instance of certain characters by one, two, three, or four escape sequences representing the UTF-8 encoding of the character (will only be four escape sequences for characters composed of two surrogate characters). Compared to encodeURI(), this function encodes more characters, including those that are part of the URI syntax.

Syntax

encodeURIComponent(uriComponent)

Parameters

• uriComponent
  • : A string to be encoded as a URI component (a path, query string, fragment, etc.). Other values are converted to strings.

Return value

A new string representing the provided uriComponent encoded as a URI component.

Exceptions

• URIError
  • : Thrown if uriComponent contains a lone surrogate.

Description

encodeURIComponent() is a function property of the global object.

encodeURIComponent() uses the same encoding algorithm as described in encodeURI(). It escapes all characters except:

A–Z a–z 0–9 - _ . ! ~ * ' ( )

Compared to encodeURI(), encodeURIComponent() escapes a larger set of characters. Use encodeURIComponent() on user-entered fields from forms POST'd to the server — this will encode & symbols that may inadvertently be generated during data entry for special HTML entities or other characters that require encoding/decoding. For example, if a user writes Jack & Jill, without encodeURIComponent(), the ampersand could be interpreted on the server as the start of a new field and jeopardize the integrity of the data.

For application/x-www-form-urlencoded, spaces are to be replaced by +, so one may wish to follow a encodeURIComponent() replacement with an additional replacement of %20 with +.