bloblang method to URL encode string

[gramian]

Dear Developers, Dear Community,

I am looking for a way to URL encode a string via bloblang. However, I could only find escape_url_query. Yet, I don't have a query, I need to pass an URL encoded string in a REST API. Is this functionality missing, or did I overlook a method for this purpose?

Thank you

[mihaitodor]

Hey @gramian. I think the name of escape_url_query might be a bit misleading, but the docs do state that it "Escapes a string so that it can be safely placed within a URL query". Under the hood, it simply calls url.QueryEscape, which, as far as I can tell, performs the percent encoding that you're looking for. I tested some examples from Mozilla's encodeURI() docs quickly via benthos blobl server and got the same results.

[gramian]

That is cool. I asked because the example given in escape_url_query suggested to me that spaces are not translated to %20 but to +.

[mihaitodor]

Ugh, indeed, it does look like there is an edge case related to spaces... Thanks for pointing it out! There's a bug report on the Go repo here regarding this, which I guess led them to also expose url.PathEscape(). As far as I can tell, url.PathEscape() encodes spaces to %20, while url.QueryEscape() encodes them to +. Guess we'll have to add a separate method for percent encoding after all. I opened an issue for it in #1617.

In the mean time, I think you could achieve what you want by using replace_all_many() instead of escape_url_query(), but there might be some nasty corner cases...