$urlencode(<text>)

This function performs a rfc3986 transformation on <text>. The rfc3986 transformation converts all bytes into percent format, except bytes with the value 0x41-0x5A (“A” - “Z”), 0x61-0x7A (“a” - “z”), 0x2D (“-”), or 0x5F (“_”).

The percent format substitutes three bytes of output for each byte of input. The first byte is 0x25 (“%”), the last two bytes are the character equivalent of the hexadecimal value of the input.

For example, a space is converted into the three bytes 0x25 0x32 0x30, (“%20”).

This conversion is popularly used to protect strange characters from mishandling in http requests.

Unfortunately, because everything in the client is done as a C string, you cannot convert binary data using this method, since the convesion will stop at the first nul (ascii 0).

The urldecode function does the reverse transformation.

This function has been superceded by xform which has a URL transform.

This can be used to mangle text passed to the /exec command so that it does not contain dangerous meta-characters. You could also rename files sent via dcc.

The input <text> with many punctuation marks substituted with “url encoded” equivalents.