URL Encoding using C#

Question

I have an application which sends a POST request to the VB forum software and logs someone in (without setting cookies or anything).

Once the user is logged in I cre

Answer 1

You should encode only the user name or other part of the URL that could be invalid. URL encoding a URL can lead to problems since something like this:

string url = HttpUtility.UrlEncode("http://www.google.com/search?q=Example");

Will yield

http%3a%2f%2fwww.google.com%2fsearch%3fq%3dExample

This is obviously not going to work well. Instead, you should encode ONLY the value of the key/value pair in the query string, like this:

string url = "http://www.google.com/search?q=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode("Example");

Hopefully that helps. Also, as teedyay mentioned, you'll still need to make sure illegal file-name characters are removed or else the file system won't like the path.