http.urlencode(dataTable)

Description

This method performs URL encoding, as defined in the RFC3986 specification, sections 2.1 to 2.3. The encoded form is often needed when the agent is interacting with web services: for instance, query strings in the URL of an HTTP GET request must be URL-encoded, in case they contain any of the ‘reserved’ characters:

{ " : / ? # @ ! $ & ' ( ) * + , ; = }

The table passed to the method as its parameter should contain key-value pairs, where the keys are strings and the values are either strings, integers or floats — or arrays of strings, integers or floats. Arrays may not be nested: more complex compound data should probably be sent in JSON format instead.

Note null values are currently encoded as follows:

server.log(http.urlencode({ "foo" : null }));

outputs:

foo=%28null%20%3A%20%28nil%29%29

If this is not your desired result, we recommend pre-processing the passed table to remove null values before encoding. For instance:

local d = { "foo" : null, "bar": 2 };

server.log(http.urlencode(d));

foreach(k, v in d) {
    if (v == null) d.rawdelete(k);
}

server.log(http.urlencode(d));

Outputs:

2024-01-12T14:28:24.355 +00:00 [Agent] foo=%28null%20%3A%20%28nil%29%29&bar=2
2024-01-12T14:28:24.355 +00:00 [Agent] bar=2

The corresponding decoding operation is http.urldecode().