URI::Escape

URI::Escape(3)        User Contributed Perl Documentation       URI::Escape(3)



NAME
       URI::Escape - Escape and unescape unsafe characters

SYNOPSIS
        use URI::Escape;
        $safe = uri_escape("10% is enough\n");
        $verysafe = uri_escape("foo", "\0-\377");
        $str  = uri_unescape($safe);

DESCRIPTION
       This module provides functions to escape and unescape URI strings as
       defined by RFC 2396 (and updated by RFC 2732).  A URI consists of a
       restricted set of characters, denoted as "uric" in RFC 2396.  The
       restricted set of characters consists of digits, letters, and a few
       graphic symbols chosen from those common to most of the character
       encodings and input facilities available to Internet users:

         "A" .. "Z", "a" .. "z", "0" .. "9",
         ";", "/", "?", ":", "@", "&", "=", "+", "$", ",", "[", "]",   # reserved
         "-", "_", ".", "!", "~", "*", "'", "(", ")"

       In addition, any byte (octet) can be represented in a URI by an escape
       sequence: a triplet consisting of the character "%" followed by two
       hexadecimal digits.  A byte can also be represented directly by a char-
       acter, using the US-ASCII character for that octet (iff the character
       is part of "uric").

       Some of the "uric" characters are reserved for use as delimiters or as
       part of certain URI components.  These must be escaped if they are to
       be treated as ordinary data.  Read RFC 2396 for further details.

       The functions provided (and exported by default) from this module are:

       uri_escape( $string )
       uri_escape( $string, $unsafe )
           Replaces each unsafe character in the $string with the correspond-
           ing escape sequence and returns the result.  The $string argument
           should be a string of bytes.  The uri_escape() function will croak
           if given a characters with code above 255.  Use uri_escape_utf8()
           if you know you have such chars or/and want chars in the 128 .. 255
           range treated as UTF-8.

           The uri_escape() function takes an optional second argument that
           overrides the set of characters that are to be escaped.  The set is
           specified as a string that can be used in a regular expression
           character class (between [ ]).  E.g.:

             "\x00-\x1f\x7f-\xff"          # all control and hi-bit characters
             "a-z"                         # all lower case characters
             "^A-Za-z"                     # everything not a letter

           The default set of characters to be escaped is all those which are
           not part of the "uric" character class shown above as well as the
           reserved characters.  I.e. the default is:

             "^A-Za-z0-9\-_.!~*'()"

       uri_escape_utf8( $string )
       uri_escape_utf8( $string, $unsafe )
           Works like uri_escape(), but will encode chars as UTF-8 before
           escaping them.  This makes this function able do deal with charac-
           ters with code above 255 in $string.  Note that chars in the 128 ..
           255 range will be escaped differently by this function compared to
           what uri_escape() would.  For chars in the 0 .. 127 range there is
           no difference.

           The call:

               $uri = uri_escape_utf8($string);

           will be the same as:

               use Encode qw(encode);
               $uri = uri_escape(encode("UTF-8", $string));

           but will even work for perl-5.6 for chars in the 128 .. 255 range.

           Note: Javascript has a function called escape() that produce the
           sequence "%uXXXX" for chars in the 256 .. 65535 range.  This func-
           tion has really nothing to do with URI escaping but some folks got
           confused since it "does the right thing" in the 0 .. 255 range.
           Because of this you sometimes see "URIs" with these kind of
           escapes.  The JavaScript encodeURI() function is similar to
           uri_escape_utf8().

       uri_unescape($string,...)
           Returns a string with each %XX sequence replaced with the actual
           byte (octet).

           This does the same as:

              $string =~ s/%([0-9A-Fa-f]{2})/chr(hex($1))/eg;

           but does not modify the string in-place as this RE would.  Using
           the uri_unescape() function instead of the RE might make the code
           look cleaner and is a few characters less to type.

           In a simple benchmark test I did, calling the function (instead of
           the inline RE above) if a few chars were unescaped was something
           like 40% slower, and something like 700% slower if none were.  If
           you are going to unescape a lot of times it might be a good idea to
           inline the RE.

           If the uri_unescape() function is passed multiple strings, then
           each one is returned unescaped.

       The module can also export the %escapes hash, which contains the map-
       ping from all 256 bytes to the corresponding escape codes.  Lookup in
       this hash is faster than evaluating "sprintf("%%%02X", ord($byte))"
       each time.

SEE ALSO
       URI

COPYRIGHT
       Copyright 1995-2004 Gisle Aas.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
       under the same terms as Perl itself.



perl v5.8.6                       2004-01-14                    URI::Escape(3)