I have a search field in a Rails App. It is implemented this way:
<%= text_field_tag :searchAny, params[:searchAny_params], placeholder: "Search", id: "search_input", class: "search-field" %>
<%= submit_tag "Search", name: nil, id: "search-button", class: "search-button" %>
When I search for strings, which contain spaces such as: find something, I get find something in params, which is then rendered in the url as find+something. To my knowledge spaces used to be escaped through +, but now they should be escaped through %20.
I very much would like to switch to %20 in my url, because I access the query string in my frontend in order to make it available to new search functions or parse it somewhere and would need the + sign as a viable query string. Currently I am unable to search for house+ or +, because the JS function I wrote splits the search string and currently has to replace + with space.
var searchquery = searchParams.split('?').pop().split('&').pop().split('=')[1].replace(/[+]/g, ' ');
After my refactoring I hope to get the search string part of my url with %20 for space and leave + available.
var searchquery = searchParams.split('?').pop().split('&').pop().split('=')[1].replace(/%20/, ' ');
How can I change how params are escaped in the search string?
I hope someone can put me in the right direction. Thanks in advance.
Currently my Rails app produces the following URL:
https://www.domain.tld/collection/opac?searchAny=find+something
I would prefer the query string to be already % escaped:
https://www.domain.tld/collection/opac?searchAny=find%20something
Based on this answer from a similar question, you can use the Addressable gem. Or alternatively you can try using Javascript's encodeUri() to handle the URL encoding from the front-end side. For example:
document.getElementById('search_button').addEventListener('click', function() {
var searchInput = document.getElementById("search_input");
var encodedQuery = encodeURI(searchInput.value)
// continue to use the encodedQuery as search query
});
Hope this helps!