Question

This question is somewhat related to What’s the simplest way to make a HTTP GET request in Perl?.

Before making the request via LWP::Simple I have a hash of query string components that I need to serialize/escape. What’s the best way to encode the query string? It should take into account spaces and all the characters that need to be escaped in valid URIs. I figure it’s probably in an existing package, but I’m not sure how to go about finding it.

use LWP::Simple; my $base_uri = 'http://example.com/rest_api/'; my %query_hash = (spam => 'eggs', foo => 'bar baz'); my $query_string = urlencode(query_hash); # Part in question. my $query_uri = '$base_uri?$query_string'; # http://example.com/rest_api/?spam=eggs&foo=bar+baz $contents = get($query_uri); 

Answer 1

URI::Escape does what you want.

use URI::Escape;  sub escape_hash {     my %hash = @_;     my @pairs;     for my $key (keys %hash) {         push @pairs, join '=', map { uri_escape($_) } $key, $hash{$key};     }     return join '&', @pairs; }