Anchor link to app with parameters, google apps script - google-apps-script

I have the following anchors in my html template:
<button>All Feedback</button>
<button>Bomgar Feedback</button>
<button>Ticket Feedback</button>
When navigating to the links with parameters, the "&" and "=" symbols are %26 and %3d in the url. Is there a way to prevent this from happening ?
Thanks

To add GET parameters to a URL, you should use the ? character to introduce them (instead of the & character). The ampersand is used to add multiple variables. So your URL should look like this.
http://script.google.com/[.......]/exec?variable=data&otherVariable=otherData
So since you didn't have the ?, the URL was sanitized to eliminate those characters.
This web app that I made illustrates the difference.
<button>Bomgar Feedback</button>

Related

HTML GET with & in a parameter

I fured out, that I got a problem with the "&" in a parameter, because the browser is interpreting it as a new parameter. Using urlencode doesn't help.
Example: http://www.example.com?artist=Brooks & Dunn&title=Maria
Is there a way to go around that problem?
Use URL encoding to encode unsafe characters in an URL.
http://www.example.com?artist=Brooks%20%26%20Dunn&title=Maria
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding

html URL: '%23' not converted to #

A webpage is opened if the URL contains '#'. But i get 'Page Not Found' error if the url contains '%23' instead of #.
Few months earlier, i was able to access my html page using the following link '%23'.
https://www.something.com/index.html%23MyPage
however, these links are now not working. but works if %23 is changed to #.
https://www.something.com/index.html#MyPage
curious, what could be the reason. Could it be something changed in the webserver? I have such links specified in many places and do not want to change if possible.
Will appreciate your help.
Using %23 instead of # is not possible. The whole purpose of URL encoded strings is that they should not have any function in the URL itself, so that you can pass letters to the URL which normally have functions.
For example ? / #. If these characters aren't encoded, the URL wants to treat them according to their function. So what if you want to use one of these characters without their function? You use encoded characters which will have no functions and are simply treated as strings.

Unwanted characters being added to url in HTML

I'm trying to include a simple hyperlink in a website:
...Engineers (IEEE) projects:
So that it ends up looking like "...Engineers (IEEE) projects:" with "IEEE" being the hyperlink.
When I click on copy link address and paste the address, instead of getting
http://www.ieee.ucla.edu/
I get
http://www.ieee.ucla.edu/%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%C5%BD
and when I click on the link, it takes me to a 404 page.
Check the link. These special character are added automatically by browser (URL Encoding).
Url Encoding
Use this code and it will work::
IEEE
The proper format to add hyperlink to a html is as follow
(texts to be hyperlink)
and for better understanding go through this link http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp
%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%C5%BD represents „ which is when you get when a unicode „ is being parsed as Windows-1252 data.
Use straight quotes to delimit attribute values in your real code. You are doing this in the code you have included in the question, but that won't have the effect you are seeing. Presumably your codes are being transformed at some point in your real code.
Add appropriate HTTP headers and <meta> data to tell the browser what encoding your file is really using

Generate a QR image with URL parameters

I'm in need of generating a QR image - but the URL needs to include parameters.
I've tried Googles:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=http://www.me.com/me.asp?i=1&n=2
...but the image generated, only links to:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=http://www.me.com/me.asp?i=1
I.e. Without n=2 at the end.
Does anyone know how to generate a QR image, which will allow more than one parameter?
You have to url encode the ampersand character & , which is %26 encoded, so it gets not confused with the normal & ampersand character used to separate the variables in your google url, so use this:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=http://www.me.com/me.asp?i=1%26n=2

What other characters beside ampersand (&) should be encoded in HTML href/src attributes?

Is the ampersand the only character that should be encoded in an HTML attribute?
It's well known that this won't pass validation:
Because the ampersand should be &. Here's a direct link to the validation fail.
This guy lists a bunch of characters that should be encoded, but he's wrong. If you encode the first "/" in http:// the href won't work.
In ASP.NET, is there a helper method already built to handle this? Stuff like Server.UrlEncode and HtmlEncode obviously don't work - those are for different purposes.
I can build my own simple extension method (like .ToAttributeView()) which does a simple string replace.
Other than standard URI encoding of the values, & is the only character related to HTML entities that you have to worry about simply because this is the character that begins every HTML entity. Take for example the following URL:
http://query.com/?q=foo&lt=bar&gt=baz
Even though there aren't trailing semi-colons, since < is the entity for < and > is the entity for >, some old browsers would translate this URL to:
http://query.com/?q=foo<=bar>=baz
So you need to specify & as & to prevent this from occurring for links within an HTML parsed document.
The purpose of escaping characters is so that they won't be processed as arguments. So you actually don't want to encode the entire url, just the values you are passing via the querystring. For example:
http://example.com/?parameter1=<ENCODED VALUE>&parameter2=<ENCODED VALUE>
The url you showed is actually a perfectly valid url that will pass validation. However, the browser will interpret the & symbols as a break between parameters in the querystring. So your querystring:
?q=whatever&lang=en
Will actually be translated by the recipient as two parameters:
q = "whatever"
lang = "en"
For your url to work you just need to ensure that your values are being encoded:
?q=<ENCODED VALUE>&lang=<ENCODED VALUE>
Edit: The common problems page from the W3C you linked to is talking about edge cases when urls are rendered in html and the & is followed by text that could be interpreted as an entity reference (&copy for example). Here is a test in jsfiddle showing the url:
http://jsfiddle.net/YjPHA/1/
In Chrome and FireFox the links works correctly, but IE renders &copy as ©, breaking the link. I have to admit I've never had a problem with this in the wild (it would only affect those entity references which don't require a semicolon, which is a pretty small subset).
To ensure you're safe from this bug you can HTML encode any of your URLS you render to the page and you should be fine. If you're using ASP.NET the HttpUtility.HtmlEncode method should work just fine.
You do not need HTML escapement here:
According to the HTML5 spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tokenization.html#character-reference-in-attribute-value-state
&lang= should be parsed as non-recognized character reference and value of the attribute should be used as it is: http://domain.com/search?q=whatever&lang=en
For the reference: added question to HTML5 WG: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Sep/0163.html
In HTML attribute values, if you want ", '&' and a non-breaking space as a result, you should (as an author who is clear about intent) have ", & and in the markup.
For " though, you don't have to use " if you use single quotes to encase your attribute values.
For HTML text nodes, in addition to the above, if you want < and > as a result, you should use < and >. (I'd even use these in attribute values too.)
For hfnames and hfvalues (and directory names in the path) for URIs, I'd used Javascript's encodeURIComponent() (on a utf-8 page when encoding for use on a utf-8 page).
If I understand the question correctly, I believe this is what you want.