Question

Im trying to use the Win8-Searchbar for scan through a http-Server.

string uriString = "http://myServer:myPort/?ItemList,SQLFilter=Title LIKE '%" + searchTerm + "%'";
Uri uri = new Uri(uriString);

Special signs like “%”, ” “(Whitespace) are getting transformed to “%25”, “%20” …

How can I prevent these transformation? The http-Server doesn´t understand it 🙁

Answer 1

According to w3schools,

URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set.

Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format.

URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits.

That’s why URL Encoding occurs and there’s no way to avoid it.

On the server side you need to use HttpUtility.UrlDecode to decode the string.

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Not related to the problem, but extremely important:

Exposing something like SQLFilter=Title LIKE '%" + searchTerm + "%'" in the URL represents a huge security issue. Anyone can modify that to run arbitrary statements on your DB.