Failure parsing url escaped data from windows

[dspaeth-faber]

Hi,

a windows client sends me the following sequence:

%f6%e4%fc%e1%20

Javascripts unescape can handle this sequence,
Qs can't. I think it's ucs2 encoding.

A spec would look like this:

qs = require('qs')

describe 'Qs', ->

  describe '#parse', ->
    it 'parses ucs2 from windows', (done) ->
      expect(unescape('%f6%e4%fc%e1%20')).to.be.like('öäüá ')
      expect(qs.parse('a=%f6%e4%fc%e1%20')).to.be.like( {'a': 'öäüá '})
      done()

Is this to be considered a Qs-Bug?

Regards
Dieter

[nlf]

In my opinion, no.

Qs only performs URI encoding/decoding (with encodeURIComponent and decodeURIComponent). Since that string is not URI encoded, it's not expected that Qs would parse it.

[dspaeth-faber]

@nlf why isn't it uri encoded? The hole url would look like this http://www.example.com?a=%f6%e4%fc%e1%20 What's wrong with this uri? http://www.motobit.com/util/url-decoder.asp decodes this uri as
windows-1250, iso-8859-1, utf-7 => http://www.example.com?a=öäüá

RFC says nothing about needed encoding.

[nlf]

Well using node's encodeURIComponent you get

encodeURIComponent('öäüá ')
'%C3%B6%C3%A4%C3%BC%C3%A1%20'

Which is definitely not encoded the same as your sample, this is because the encodeURIComponent and decodeURIComponent methods adhere to RFC 3629 and uses UTF-8 encoding since RFC 3986 does not specify how to encode non-ascii values.

[dspaeth-faber]

Ok, so Qs only supports the same encoding as encodeURIComponent supports. Exotic clients like windows clients are not supported. Thank you for the clarification.