Sending a text string with %20 to your Proxy Pass-Through

I thought I had everything working after my last post about “Building your Proxy Pass-Through URL”. As it turns out everything works fine till you have, in my case, a space between City spellings. I remembered seeing a post about that problem so I logged in and found Jassin's post about Parsing Errors. That gave me a clue about what I needed to do to make my stuff work but I really didn’t want to change my PHP and it looked like a lot of work to replace spaces with %20 in PHP. This is what I did instead:

I used a switch statement because I needed to map our Trail Map City to the Active.com City and define an event_City variable depending on which city is selected.

switch(event_City)
{
case 'tallahassee':
var event_City = "Tallahassee" + "%20" + "-" + "%20" + "Thomasville";
no_event_City = "Tallahassee - Thomasville";
break;
}

You can see that I took Jassin's advice and used it to build my City strings with %20 instead of spaces. However after doing that I still couldn’t get it to work and, it seemed to give me the same results as passing my city string in with spaces.

After playing with that for a while I decided to try something Josh used with the Yahoo Weather API. This function, encodeURIComponent(), encodes special characters as well as these characters: , / ? : @ & = + $ #.

I really wasn’t sure if this would work because it seemed that I would need to decode my string on the server end. Well, you can believe that I was not only surprised but extremely happy when I used encodeURIComponent(event_City) and it worked!!! I didn’t have to change anything with my PHP proxy pass-through.

This is my original url: var url = 'active.php?path=' + event_City;

And, this is my new url: var url = 'active.php?path=' + encodeURIComponent(event_City);

So all I really needed to do to get this to work was to build the string with %20 instead of spaces and send it to my PHP with encodeURIComponent(event_City).