Url Unicode characters encoding

Question

How to encode URLs containing Unicode? I would like to pass it to a command line utility and I need to encode it first.

Example: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/白雜訊

becomes http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E9%9B%9C%E8%A8%8A.

• Tomas: It seems Stackoverflow text editor encoded Unicode url. I would like to do the same in c#. Click on the link to get actual Unicode url.
• Konrad Rudolph: Stack Overflow didn’t do this – your browser did! It displays the URL as Unicode but when you copy it, the copied text contains the URL-encoded string.
• The Dag: @KonradRudolph My browser, however, did not. I see it as what I presume to be chinese characters. :)
• Konrad Rudolph: @TheDag That’s a misconception: the browser may still display the URL as Unicode, but internally it’s URL-encoded. To check this, try copying the Unicode URL from the address bar and pasting it into a text field (but not the address bar).

Answer 1

You can use the HttpUtility.UrlPathEncode method in the System.Web assembly (requires the full .NET Framework 4 profile):

var encoded = HttpUtility.UrlPathEncode("http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/白雜訊");

• Tomas: How to get Unicode characters? The url will be passed by users and I do not know where Unicode characters appears in url.
• Martin Liversage: @Tomas: Updated answer in response to your comment.
• bobince: Note that UrlPathEncode is the correct thing to do for characters in the path and other parts of the URL except for the hostname. If you have Unicode characters in the hostname of an IRI, then to make a URI of it you must encode them using the IDN algorithm (Punycode).

Answer 2

According to MSDN you can't use UrlPathEncode anymore.

So, Correct way of doing it now is,

var urlString = Uri.EscapeUriString("http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/白雜訊");

Answer 3

Server.UrlEncode(s);

.NET strings are natively Unicode strings (UTF-8 encoded, to be specific) so you need to nothing more than invoke HttpServerUtility.UrlEncode (though the so-called "intrinsic" Server property will be available in most contexts in asp.net where you may want to do this).

• Tomas: I do not want to encode :// characters, only Unicode characters.
• Matthew: You encode the individual parameter values, not the entire url.
• Tomas: If I pass unicode url to Server.UrlEncode(s) it will encode all unicode characters along with special url characters like :, ? and // I do not want to do that.
• Matthew: Thats why you encode individual parameters. <a href="mysite.com?myParameter=<%=Server.UrlEncode("SomeUnicodeString")%>">My Link</a>

Answer 4

I had Turkish character problem.<a href="/@Html.Raw(string)" solved the problem

• Dai: Using Html.Raw() here means introducing an XSS vulnerability. There's nothing special about the Turkish-I, so using @myStringValue will work without any problems unless you're not using Unicode/UTF-8 consistently in your project and/or project files.