Url Encoding Using C#

URL Encoding using C#

Edit: Note that this answer is now out of date. See Siarhei Kuchuk's answer below for a better fix

UrlEncoding will do what you are suggesting here. With C#, you simply use HttpUtility, as mentioned.

You can also Regex the illegal characters and then replace, but this gets far more complex, as you will have to have some form of state machine (switch ... case, for example) to replace with the correct characters. Since UrlEncode does this up front, it is rather easy.

As for Linux versus windows, there are some characters that are acceptable in Linux that are not in Windows, but I would not worry about that, as the folder name can be returned by decoding the Url string, using UrlDecode, so you can round trip the changes.

How to URL encode strings in C#

According to RFC 1738:

Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and
reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used
unencoded within a URL.

Neither HttpUtility.UrlEncode nor WebUtility.UrlEncode will encode those characters since the standard says the parentheses () can be used unencoded.

I don't know why the URL Encoder / Decoder you linked encodes them since it also lists them as as a character that can be used in a URL.

C# method to do URL encoding?

HttpUtility.UrlEncode

URL encode in C#

HttpUtility.UrlEncode does the right thing here.

Encodes a URL string. The UrlEncode method can be used to encode the entire URL, including query-string values.

When it comes to spaces on the URL, a + or %20 are both correct.

Also see URL encoding the space character: + or %20?.

UTF-8 URL Encode

The method HttpUtility.ParseQueryString internally returns a HttpValueCollection. HttpValueCollection.ToString() already performs url encoding, so you don't need to do that yourself. If you do it yourself, it is performed twice and you get the wrong result that you see.

I don't see the relation to UTF-8. The value you use ({"mbox":"mailto: UserName@company.com"}) doesn't contain any characters that would look different in UTF-8.

References:

HttpValueCollection and NameValueCollection
ParseQueryString source
HttpValueCollection source

Create new Uri using Url encoded string in C#

Based on locale settings and used keyboard, iOS may use some other apostrophe-like character, for example right single quotation mark U+2019 (').
Solution was to handle that.

URL Encode and Decode in ASP.NET Core

For ASP.NET Core 2.0+ just add System.Net namespace - WebUtility class is shipped as part of System.Runtime.Extensions nuget package, that is referenced by default in ASP.NET Core project.
For the previous version add Microsoft.AspNetCore.WebUtilities nuget package.

Then the WebUtility class will be available for you:

public static class WebUtility
{
    public static string UrlDecode(string encodedValue);
    public static string UrlEncode(string value);
}

Url Encoding Using C#