URLDecode

Description

Decodes a URL-encoded string.

Return value

A copy of a string, decoded.

Syntax

URLDecode(urlEncodedString[, charset])

History

New in ColdFusion MX: ColdFusion supports the Java UCS-2 representation of Unicode character values 0-65535. (Earlier releases supported ASCII values.)

New in ColdFusion MX: the charset parameter is new.

Parameters

Parameter Description

urlEncodedString
URL-encoded string or a variable that contains one.

charset
A Java character set name. Optional.
The following values are typically used:

UTF-8

ISO-8859-1

UTF-16

US-ASCII

UTF-16BE

UTF-16LE

For a list of character sets, see:
http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset-lang.html

Parameter	Description
urlEncodedString	URL-encoded string or a variable that contains one.
charset	A Java character set name. Optional. The following values are typically used: UTF-8 ISO-8859-1 UTF-16 US-ASCII UTF-16BE UTF-16LE For a list of character sets, see: http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset-lang.html

Usage

URL encoding formats some characters with a percent sign and the two-character hexadecimal representation of the character. For example, a character whose code is 129 is encoded as %81. A space is encoded with a plus sign.

Query strings in HTTP are always URL-encoded.

Example

This example creates, encodes, and decodes a string that contains ASCII character codes.

<cfscript>
  // Build string
  s = "";
  for (c = 1; c lte 256; c = c + 1)
  {
    s = s & chr(c);
  }
  // Encode string and display result
  enc = URLEncodedFormat(s);
  writeOutput("Encoded string is: '#enc#'.<br>");
  // Decode and compare result with original
  dec = URLDecode(enc);
  if (dec neq s)
  {
    writeOutput("Decoded is not the same as encoded.");
  }
  else
  {
    writeOutput("All's quiet on the Western front.");
  }
</cfscript>