How to specify an address in a Google Maps Directions API URL - google-maps

Question

How do you specify an address in a Google Maps Web Services Directions API URL? The Maps Web Services page states
Converting a URL that you receive from user input is sometimes tricky. For example, a user may enter an address as "5th&Main St." Generally, you should construct your URL from its parts, treating any user input as literal characters.
However this isn't very clear. There are no examples and I haven't been able to find any on the web. Does this mean that, for the given example, "5th&Main St." the following valid?
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/directions/json?destination=5th%26Main+St.&sensor=true
If not, what would be the correct conversion?
Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

As per my understanding, you are looking for URI encode.
In Javascript:
encodeURI is used to encode a string with special characters including
foreign language.
Example:
var address = "5th&Main St.";
var encodedAddress = encodeURI(address);
then pass the encodedAddress in the google maps API.
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/directions/json?destination=encodedAddress&sensor=true
A small list of symbol equivalent encoding (Percent encoding):
space %20
! %21
" %22
# %23
$ %24
% %25
& %26 // this what happended in your case
' %27
( %28
) %29
Once I faced an issue, whild doing geocoding via C#.
Where I did a similar URI encoding using HttpUtility.UrlEncode() for address and then passed it to the Google API as I mentioned in above. Each language has its own encoding technique, yet the output is same.
Hope you understand.