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Asked: 2026-06-10T02:39:26+00:00

Why does this url resolve in 400 – Bad Request? http://localhost:2785/api/ticker/Web.App.QuotesReaders/search=se%3Aabb My environment is

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Why does this url resolve in 400 – Bad Request?

http://localhost:2785/api/ticker/Web.App.QuotesReaders/search=se%3Aabb

My environment is Visual Studio 2010, MVC 4 and the controller used is a WebApiController.

The %3A is an URL-encoded colon.

SOLUTION

This works for some reason:

http://localhost:2785/api/ticker?className=Web.App.QuotesReaders&search=se%3Aabb

… which means, I couldn’t specify this route in global.asax.cs:

/api/ticker/{className}/{search}

… nor this …

/api/ticker/{className}/search={search}

… but this …

/api/ticker

For further information: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ExperimentsInWackinessAllowingPercentsAnglebracketsAndOtherNaughtyThingsInTheASPNETIISRequestURL.aspx

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It seems that ASP.net does not allow colons before the ‘?’ in an URL, even if it is encoded as %3A.

    For example, these won’t work

    http://foo.org/api/persons/foo:bar
    http://foo.org/api/persons/foo%3abar

    But this works:
    http://foo.org/api/persons?id=foo%3abar

    In all examples, we would expect ASP.NET MVC to pass “foo:bar” as an id argument, properly decoded. I just tested this with MVC4 and it seems to work. It is annoying that it doesn’t accept the URL encoding before the question mark though, but I’m sure there is a good reason for it. Probably to keep everything before the question mark a valid URL and any arguments after the question mark.

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