Question

i am building a query string for my url and need to exclude certain chars from the encode.

I want to exclude the “&” and the “=” so that I can make a statement as such:

first=blah&second=blah and so on….

I guess the best way to put it is how do I stop them from being encoded?

some code:

 else if (array[i].nodeName == "SELECT") {
   if (array[i].id == "multiple") {
     var selected = $.map($('#multiple option:selected'),

     function (e) {
       return $(e).val();
     });
     $.each(selected, function (index, value) {
       name = array[i].name;
       values += app + "\&" + key + "=";
     });

   } else {
     name = arr[i].name;
     values = arr[i].value;
   }
 }

 key = encodeURIComponent(name);
 value = encodeURIComponent(values);
 queryString += name + "=" + values + "&";

Answer 1

Is there a way to exclude certain chars from encodeURIComponent?

No. It’s a builtin function that takes exactly one argument.

---

You do need to encode & when it appears in the middle of a key or value so the simplest solution is to encode the individual names and values before combining them. Define

function emit(name, value) {
  queryString += (queryString.indexOf("?") >= 0 ? "&" : "?")
    + encodeURIComponent(name) + "=" + encodeURIComponent(value);
}

and then call that function for each name/value pair in multiple selects or once for each other checked input.

else if (array[i].nodeName=="SELECT" ){
  if(array[i].id == "multiple"){
    var selected = $.map( $('#multiple option:selected'),
                          function(e){return $(e).val();});
    $.each(selected, function(index, value){
             emit(array[i].name, value);
           });
  } else {
    emit(arr[i].name, arr[i].value);
  }
}

Using encodeURI or similar will not properly encode #, = or other necessary code-points.