Facing issues with special characters in url in dispatcher

[p0990m]

Hi All, We are sending some data through the query parameter in url which has some special characters like { },[], ". Example url : /content/abc/test.html?data={"title":"Get%20a%20Quote%20-%20Compare%20Plans%20and%20Prices","travelers":[{"age":20,"sameAddress":true,"tripCost":300}]}. converted url - /content/abc/test.html?data=%7b%2522title%2522:%2522Get%2520a%2520Quote%2520-%2520Compare%2520Plans%2520and%2520Prices%2522.... In our QA publish url it is working fine, but in the dispatcher url these special characters  are getting converted into their hex-code equivalent. So can you please do let me know what rewrite rules and which file we do need to write in dispatcher to avoid those special characters to getting converted to their hex-code?

[BrianKasingli]

@p0990m,

Within your httpd.conf, you can try to add:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

Making sure you have utf-8 encoding enabled.

[Kunal_Gaba_]

I recommend you to pass the JSON object in request body not in query params. And use POST method for these type of requests. 

[kiranparab · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Avoid encoding dispatcher URLs -

Rewrite rules on Apache web server that attempt to redirect to URLs with special characters such as & or ? or #anchor aren't being redirected properly.  For example:

RewriteRule ^/we-retail.html /we-retail.html#anchor [R=301,L]

To avoid encoding the # character, add the NE flag to the rewrite rules:

RewriteRule ^/test.html /test.html#anchor [NE,R=301,L]

Special characters such as & and ?, will be converted to their hexcode equivalent. Using the [NE] flag prevents that from happening.

RewriteRule ^/anchor/(.+) /bigpage.html#$1 [NE,R]

The above example will redirect /anchor/xyz to /bigpage.html#xyz. Omitting the [NE] will result in the # being converted to its hexcode equivalent, %23, which will then result in a 404 Not Found error condition.

Reference Link - https://www.aemquickstart.in/2019/07/avoid-encoding-dispatcher-urls.html

Thanks,

Kiran Parab

[kautuk_sahni]

kiranparab Thanks for assisting community.

[lucian_nicolaescu]

The short, right answer for the question itself is the apache rewrite NE flag.

The long answer... is that you shouldn't send JSON objects in URLs for many many reasons. Some options:

1. Use a POST

2. Save that JSON in the browser session or local storage and read it on the next page.

3. At least transform that JSON in "normal" URL params and pass that...