Use of % as wildcard messing up my QueryString
Arch Stanton
and presses a button; the text is passed via a QueryString to another
aspx page and used in a SQL search. The wildcard character is a percent
sign.
This works great if I place the % at the end of a search string, but I'm
getting peculiar errors if I start the search string with the wildcard
character. My search string seems to be altered at the front, and I
can't figure out a pattern.
The passed string looks fine in the address bar. For instance, if I
enter "%500", the address bar on the destination page looks like this:
"http://localhost/Results.aspx?QueryString=(SerialNumber%20LIKE%20'%500');"
But the destination page sees the string " %500 " as " 'P0' " (without
the outside quotes). As I said, if I use the % at the end of the string,
everything works fine.
I'd be happy to post my code, but I'm guessing that anyone who knows why
this is happening will be able to tell me without it. I'm also guessing
that this has something to do with the percent signs that ASP uses to
pass strings with spaces, but I can't figure out what to do about it.
As usual, thanks so much for any help.
Mark Fitzpatrick
reserved by ASP, it's actually part of the URL specification. Nothing to do
with Microsoft, but the engineering committees that set the standards for
handling URL's. For example, %20 is a the code for a space in a URL as
you've noticed, but there are lots of others (unfortunately I can't find my
link to their definitions). Try using the Server.UrlEncode method to get a
safe string that you can then pass into the querystring and on the other end
use the Server.UrlDecode method to get the data back out like so: string
query = Server.UrlDecode(Request.QueryString["QueryString"]);
You have to pay careful attention to what you put into a querystring because
a lot of things are not allowed.
Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Microsoft MVP - Expression
"Arch Stanton" <sa...@hill.org> wrote in message
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