Escaping URI data string in particular encoding

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Hello friends,

I need to escape URI data string using ISO-8859-15 encoding.
As I am using this code, the output is still escaped by using UTF-8 encoding, since Uri.EscapeDataString is internally using UTF-8 encoding.

C#

var srcEnc = Encoding.Unicode;
var uniString = "This is a test £.";
var srcBytes = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(uniString);

var dstEnc = Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-15"); // http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15
var dstBytes = Encoding.Convert(srcEnc, dstEnc, srcBytes);
var dstString = dstEnc.GetString(dstBytes);

var data = Uri.EscapeDataString(dstString); // output should be "This%20is%20a%20test%20%a3." (%a3 for £)

One workaround would be to take all ISO bytes (dstBytes) and manually format each byte like "%xx", but for debugging reasons this is not acceptable.
I cannot reference System.Web assembly.

Thank you for any help.

Posted 19-Mar-13 3:57am

Matej Hlatky

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 19-Mar-13 10:01am

How come you have this encoding in first place? It is obsolete. Why not to transcode data to Unicode (UTF-8) first?
—SA

Matej Hlatky 19-Mar-13 10:21am

Hi. This encoding is required by some gateway we are using. It's not my choice.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 19-Mar-13 10:39am

I'm not asking about it. I'm asking why.
—SA

Matej Hlatky 19-Mar-13 11:29am

The 3rd party gateway is used for sending SMS.
When I send escaped utf8 string, while the gateway is expecting escaped string in iso encoding, the incoming SMS contains additional chars.
Gateway additionaly supports sending of utf8 encoded texts (which is the solution in fact), but this can be problem if destination mobile network does not supports
it.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 19-Mar-13 12:06pm

That is nasty. Anyway, do you have a problem converting to ISO.. ? Unfortunately, I don't know how such think can be used in URI or, say, escaped. If this is a usual, '%' escaping (URL encoding), it should not be a problem.

Do you have any correctly working samples of URI for this gateway, with ISO-8859-15 encoding, escaped or whatever. Can you show such sample?

—SA

Matej Hlatky 19-Mar-13 12:12pm

Sample escaped iso string is on the last line of my code example in comment ("This%20is%20a%20test%20%a3."). Anyway, I implemented iso encode method by myself.
Thank you for your time.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 19-Mar-13 12:15pm

This is not a representative sample. How about non-ASCII code points? I answered the question tentatively, please try.
I'll appreciate your feedback. Will it work for you or not.
—SA

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-19T06:13:00

Solution 1

I cannot be sure that what I suggest will work, because this situation with your gateway looks quite pathological to me.

However, I strongly suspect that you simply have to percent-encode all characters beyond ASCII with and pass all characters with ASCII subset (up to code point 127) as is. Just look and compare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO-8859-15[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII[^].

Just for a record: even if you quite redundantly percent-encode each character in the URI, it will work; the only problem is its readability for a user.

And the escaping should be done using this schema: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_encoding[^].

In addition to the characters shown in tables, percent-encode all characters with code points above 127.

Just give it a try.

—SA

Posted 19-Mar-13 6:13am

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

Comments

Maciej Los 19-Mar-13 12:26pm

Sergey, i like your comments, for example this: " situation with your gateway looks quite pathological to me".
+5!

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 19-Mar-13 12:32pm

Thank you, Maciej. It looks like we have characteristic Easter European picky attitudes... :-)
I hope my guesswork worked out for OP who accepted it.
—SA

Maciej Los 19-Mar-13 12:44pm

It's not Eastern European picky attitude... Your remarks are totally in of character. As mine ;)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 19-Mar-13 13:35pm

:-)

Matej Hlatky 19-Mar-13 12:43pm

Thank you again for your time. Your answer is basically the solution which I used and it works like a charm. :)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 19-Mar-13 13:35pm

My pleasure.
Good luck, call again.
—SA