Encode / decode URLs

Question

What\'s the recommended way of encoding and decoding entire URLs in Go? I am aware of the methods url.QueryEscape and url.QueryUnescape, but they d

Answer 1

From MDN on encodeURIComponent:

encodeURIComponent escapes all characters except the following: alphabetic, decimal digits, '-', '_', '.', '!', '~', '*', ''', '(', ')'

From Go's implementation of url.QueryEscape (specifically, the shouldEscape private function), escapes all characters except the following: alphabetic, decimal digits, '-', '_', '.', '~'.

Unlike Javascript, Go's QueryEscape() will escape '!', '*', ''', '(', ')'. Basically, Go's version is strictly RFC-3986 compliant. Javascript's is looser. Again from MDN:

If one wishes to be more stringent in adhering to RFC 3986 (which reserves !, ', (, ), and *), even though these characters have no formalized URI delimiting uses, the following can be safely used:

function fixedEncodeURIComponent (str) {
  return encodeURIComponent(str).replace(/[!'()]/g, escape).replace(/\*/g, "%2A");
}