Question

I am trying to link to a file that has the ‘#’ character in via a window.open() call. The file does exist and can be linked to just fine using a normal anchor tag.

I have tried escaping the ‘#’ character with ‘%23’ but when the window.open(myurl) gets processed, the ‘%23’ becomes ‘%2523’. This tells me that my url string is being escapped by the window.open call changing the ‘%’ to the ‘%25’.

Are there ways to work around this extra escaping.

Sample code:

<script language='javascript'> function escapePound(url) {    // original attempt    newUrl = url.replace('#', '%23');    // first answer attempt - doesn't work    // newUrl = url.replace('#', '\\#');     return newUrl;  } </script> <a href='#top' onclick='url = '\\\\MyUNCPath\\PropertyRushRefi-Add#1-ABCDEF.RTF'; window.open(escapePound(url)); return true;'>Some Doc</a> 

URL that yells says ‘file://MyUNCPath/PropertyRushRefi-Add%25231-ABCDEF.RTF’ cannot be found

Answer 1

You seek the dark magicks of encodeURI:

window.open('http://your-url.com/' + encodeURIComponent('foo#123.jpg'));