JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Name

encodeURIComponent() — escape characters in a URI component

Synopsis

encodeURIComponent(s)

Arguments

s

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

Returns

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

Throws

URIError

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

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.

Example

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

See Also

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