How to urlencode data for curl command?

Use curl --data-urlencode; from man curl:

This posts data, similar to the other --data options with the exception that this performs URL-encoding. To be CGI-compliant, the part should begin with a name followed by a separator and a content specification.

Example usage:

curl \
    --data-urlencode "paramName=value" \
    --data-urlencode "secondParam=value" \
    http://example.com

See the man page for more info.

This requires curl 7.18.0 or newer (released January 2008). Use curl -V to check which version you have.

You can as well encode the query string:

curl --get \
    --data-urlencode "p1=value 1" \
    --data-urlencode "p2=value 2" \
    http://example.com
    # http://example.com?p1=value%201&p2=value%202

---

Here is the pure BASH answer.

Update: Since many changes have been discussed, I have placed this on https://github.com/sfinktah/bash/blob/master/rawurlencode.inc.sh for anybody to issue a PR against.

Note: This solution is not intended to encode unicode or multi-byte characters - which are quite outside BASH's humble native capabilities. It's only intended to encode symbols that would otherwise ruin argument passing in POST or GET requests, e.g. '&', '=' and so forth.

Very Important Note: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WRITE YOUR OWN UNICODE CONVERSION FUNCTION, IN ANY LANGUAGE, EVER. See end of answer.

rawurlencode() {
  local string="${1}"
  local strlen=${#string}
  local encoded=""
  local pos c o

  for (( pos=0 ; pos<strlen ; pos++ )); do
     c=${string:$pos:1}
     case "$c" in
        [-_.~a-zA-Z0-9] ) o="${c}" ;;
        * )               printf -v o '%%%02x' "'$c"
     esac
     encoded+="${o}"
  done
  echo "${encoded}"    # You can either set a return variable (FASTER) 
  REPLY="${encoded}"   #+or echo the result (EASIER)... or both... :p
}

You can use it in two ways:

easier:  echo http://url/q?=$( rawurlencode "$args" )
faster:  rawurlencode "$args"; echo http://url/q?${REPLY}

[edited]

Here's the matching rawurldecode() function, which - with all modesty - is awesome.

# Returns a string in which the sequences with percent (%) signs followed by
# two hex digits have been replaced with literal characters.
rawurldecode() {

  # This is perhaps a risky gambit, but since all escape characters must be
  # encoded, we can replace %NN with \xNN and pass the lot to printf -b, which
  # will decode hex for us

  printf -v REPLY '%b' "${1//%/\\x}" # You can either set a return variable (FASTER)

  echo "${REPLY}"  #+or echo the result (EASIER)... or both... :p
}

With the matching set, we can now perform some simple tests:

$ diff rawurlencode.inc.sh \
        <( rawurldecode "$( rawurlencode "$( cat rawurlencode.inc.sh )" )" ) \
        && echo Matched

Output: Matched

And if you really really feel that you need an external tool (well, it will go a lot faster, and might do binary files and such...) I found this on my OpenWRT router...

replace_value=$(echo $replace_value | sed -f /usr/lib/ddns/url_escape.sed)

Where url_escape.sed was a file that contained these rules:

# sed url escaping
s:%:%25:g
s: :%20:g
s:<:%3C:g
s:>:%3E:g
s:#:%23:g
s:{:%7B:g
s:}:%7D:g
s:|:%7C:g
s:\\:%5C:g
s:\^:%5E:g
s:~:%7E:g
s:\[:%5B:g
s:\]:%5D:g
s:`:%60:g
s:;:%3B:g
s:/:%2F:g
s:?:%3F:g
s^:^%3A^g
s:@:%40:g
s:=:%3D:g
s:&:%26:g
s:\$:%24:g
s:\!:%21:g
s:\*:%2A:g

While it is not impossible to write such a script in BASH (probably using xxd and a very lengthy ruleset) capable of handing UTF-8 input, there are faster and more reliable ways. Attempting to decode UTF-8 into UTF-32 is a non-trivial task to do with accuracy, though very easy to do inaccurately such that you think it works until the day it doesn't.

Even the Unicode Consortium removed their sample code after discovering it was no longer 100% compatible with the actual standard.

The Unicode standard is constantly evolving, and has become extremely nuanced. Any implementation you can whip together will not be properly compliant, and if by some extreme effort you managed it, it wouldn't stay compliant.

---

Another option is to use jq:

$ printf %s 'encode this'|jq -sRr @uri
encode%20this
$ jq -rn --arg x 'encode this' '$x|@uri'
encode%20this

-r (--raw-output) outputs the raw contents of strings instead of JSON string literals. -n (--null-input) doesn't read input from STDIN.

-R (--raw-input) treats input lines as strings instead of parsing them as JSON, and -sR (--slurp --raw-input) reads the input into a single string. You can replace -sRr with -Rr if your input only contains a single line, or if you don't want to replace linefeeds with %0A:

$ printf %s\\n 'multiple lines' 'of text'|jq -Rr @uri
multiple%20lines
of%20text
$ printf %s\\n 'multiple lines' 'of text'|jq -sRr @uri
multiple%20lines%0Aof%20text%0A

Or this percent-encodes all bytes:

xxd -p|tr -d \\n|sed 's/../%&/g'

---

Use Perl's URI::Escape module and uri_escape function in the second line of your bash script:

...

value="$(perl -MURI::Escape -e 'print uri_escape($ARGV[0]);' "$2")"
...

Edit: Fix quoting problems, as suggested by Chris Johnsen in the comments. Thanks!

---

One of variants, may be ugly, but simple:

urlencode() {
    local data
    if [[ $# != 1 ]]; then
        echo "Usage: $0 string-to-urlencode"
        return 1
    fi
    data="$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w %{url_effective} --get --data-urlencode "$1" "")"
    if [[ $? != 3 ]]; then
        echo "Unexpected error" 1>&2
        return 2
    fi
    echo "${data##/?}"
    return 0
}

Here is the one-liner version for example (as suggested by Bruno):

date | curl -Gso /dev/null -w %{url_effective} --data-urlencode @- "" | cut -c 3-

# If you experience the trailing %0A, use
date | curl -Gso /dev/null -w %{url_effective} --data-urlencode @- "" | sed -E 's/..(.*).../\1/'

---

for the sake of completeness, many solutions using sed or awk only translate a special set of characters and are hence quite large by code size and also dont translate other special characters that should be encoded.

a safe way to urlencode would be to just encode every single byte - even those that would've been allowed.

echo -ne 'some random\nbytes' | xxd -plain | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/\(..\)/%\1/g'

xxd is taking care here that the input is handled as bytes and not characters.

edit:

xxd comes with the vim-common package in Debian and I was just on a system where it was not installed and I didnt want to install it. The altornative is to use hexdump from the bsdmainutils package in Debian. According to the following graph, bsdmainutils and vim-common should have an about equal likelihood to be installed:

http://qa.debian.org/popcon-png.php?packages=vim-common%2Cbsdmainutils&show_installed=1&want_legend=1&want_ticks=1

but nevertheless here a version which uses hexdump instead of xxd and allows to avoid the tr call:

echo -ne 'some random\nbytes' | hexdump -v -e '/1 "%02x"' | sed 's/\(..\)/%\1/g'

---

I find it more readable in python:

encoded_value=$(python3 -c "import urllib.parse; print urllib.parse.quote('''$value''')")

the triple ' ensures that single quotes in value won't hurt. urllib is in the standard library. It work for example for this crazy (real world) url:

"http://www.rai.it/dl/audio/" "1264165523944Ho servito il re d'Inghilterra - Puntata 7

---

I've found the following snippet useful to stick it into a chain of program calls, where URI::Escape might not be installed:

perl -p -e 's/([^A-Za-z0-9])/sprintf("%%%02X", ord($1))/seg'

(source)

---

If you wish to run GET request and use pure curl just add --get to @Jacob's solution.

Here is an example:

curl -v --get --data-urlencode "access_token=$(cat .fb_access_token)" https://graph.facebook.com/me/feed

---

This may be the best one:

after=$(echo -e "$before" | od -An -tx1 | tr ' ' % | xargs printf "%s")

---

Direct link to awk version : http://www.shelldorado.com/scripts/cmds/urlencode
I used it for years and it works like a charm

:
##########################################################################
# Title      :  urlencode - encode URL data
# Author     :  Heiner Steven (heiner.steven@odn.de)
# Date       :  2000-03-15
# Requires   :  awk
# Categories :  File Conversion, WWW, CGI
# SCCS-Id.   :  @(#) urlencode  1.4 06/10/29
##########################################################################
# Description
#   Encode data according to
#       RFC 1738: "Uniform Resource Locators (URL)" and
#       RFC 1866: "Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0" (HTML)
#
#   This encoding is used i.e. for the MIME type
#   "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
#
# Notes
#    o  The default behaviour is not to encode the line endings. This
#   may not be what was intended, because the result will be
#   multiple lines of output (which cannot be used in an URL or a
#   HTTP "POST" request). If the desired output should be one
#   line, use the "-l" option.
#
#    o  The "-l" option assumes, that the end-of-line is denoted by
#   the character LF (ASCII 10). This is not true for Windows or
#   Mac systems, where the end of a line is denoted by the two
#   characters CR LF (ASCII 13 10).
#   We use this for symmetry; data processed in the following way:
#       cat | urlencode -l | urldecode -l
#   should (and will) result in the original data
#
#    o  Large lines (or binary files) will break many AWK
#       implementations. If you get the message
#       awk: record `...' too long
#        record number xxx
#   consider using GNU AWK (gawk).
#
#    o  urlencode will always terminate it's output with an EOL
#       character
#
# Thanks to Stefan Brozinski for pointing out a bug related to non-standard
# locales.
#
# See also
#   urldecode
##########################################################################

PN=`basename "$0"`          # Program name
VER='1.4'

: ${AWK=awk}

Usage () {
    echo >&2 "$PN - encode URL data, $VER
usage: $PN [-l] [file ...]
    -l:  encode line endings (result will be one line of output)

The default is to encode each input line on its own."
    exit 1
}

Msg () {
    for MsgLine
    do echo "$PN: $MsgLine" >&2
    done
}

Fatal () { Msg "$@"; exit 1; }

set -- `getopt hl "$@" 2>/dev/null` || Usage
[ $# -lt 1 ] && Usage           # "getopt" detected an error

EncodeEOL=no
while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
    case "$1" in
        -l) EncodeEOL=yes;;
    --) shift; break;;
    -h) Usage;;
    -*) Usage;;
    *)  break;;         # First file name
    esac
    shift
done

LANG=C  export LANG
$AWK '
    BEGIN {
    # We assume an awk implementation that is just plain dumb.
    # We will convert an character to its ASCII value with the
    # table ord[], and produce two-digit hexadecimal output
    # without the printf("%02X") feature.

    EOL = "%0A"     # "end of line" string (encoded)
    split ("1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F", hextab, " ")
    hextab [0] = 0
    for ( i=1; i<=255; ++i ) ord [ sprintf ("%c", i) "" ] = i + 0
    if ("'"$EncodeEOL"'" == "yes") EncodeEOL = 1; else EncodeEOL = 0
    }
    {
    encoded = ""
    for ( i=1; i<=length ($0); ++i ) {
        c = substr ($0, i, 1)
        if ( c ~ /[a-zA-Z0-9.-]/ ) {
        encoded = encoded c     # safe character
        } else if ( c == " " ) {
        encoded = encoded "+"   # special handling
        } else {
        # unsafe character, encode it as a two-digit hex-number
        lo = ord [c] % 16
        hi = int (ord [c] / 16);
        encoded = encoded "%" hextab [hi] hextab [lo]
        }
    }
    if ( EncodeEOL ) {
        printf ("%s", encoded EOL)
    } else {
        print encoded
    }
    }
    END {
        #if ( EncodeEOL ) print ""
    }
' "$@"

---

Here's a Bash solution which doesn't invoke any external programs:

uriencode() {
  s="${1//'%'/%25}"
  s="${s//' '/%20}"
  s="${s//'"'/%22}"
  s="${s//'#'/%23}"
  s="${s//'$'/%24}"
  s="${s//'&'/%26}"
  s="${s//'+'/%2B}"
  s="${s//','/%2C}"
  s="${s//'/'/%2F}"
  s="${s//':'/%3A}"
  s="${s//';'/%3B}"
  s="${s//'='/%3D}"
  s="${s//'?'/%3F}"
  s="${s//'@'/%40}"
  s="${s//'['/%5B}"
  s="${s//']'/%5D}"
  printf %s "$s"
}

---

url=$(echo "$1" | sed -e 's/%/%25/g' -e 's/ /%20/g' -e 's/!/%21/g' -e 's/"/%22/g' -e 's/#/%23/g' -e 's/\$/%24/g' -e 's/\&/%26/g' -e 's/'\''/%27/g' -e 's/(/%28/g' -e 's/)/%29/g' -e 's/\*/%2a/g' -e 's/+/%2b/g' -e 's/,/%2c/g' -e 's/-/%2d/g' -e 's/\./%2e/g' -e 's/\//%2f/g' -e 's/:/%3a/g' -e 's/;/%3b/g' -e 's//%3e/g' -e 's/?/%3f/g' -e 's/@/%40/g' -e 's/\[/%5b/g' -e 's/\\/%5c/g' -e 's/\]/%5d/g' -e 's/\^/%5e/g' -e 's/_/%5f/g' -e 's/`/%60/g' -e 's/{/%7b/g' -e 's/|/%7c/g' -e 's/}/%7d/g' -e 's/~/%7e/g')

this will encode the string inside of $1 and output it in $url. although you don't have to put it in a var if you want. BTW didn't include the sed for tab thought it would turn it into spaces

---

Using php from a shell script:

value="http://www.google.com"
encoded=$(php -r "echo rawurlencode('$value');")
# encoded = "http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com"
echo $(php -r "echo rawurldecode('$encoded');")
# returns: "http://www.google.com"

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.rawurlencode.php http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.rawurldecode.php

---

If you don't want to depend on Perl you can also use sed. It's a bit messy, as each character has to be escaped individually. Make a file with the following contents and call it urlencode.sed

s/%/%25/g
s/ /%20/g
s/ /%09/g
s/!/%21/g
s/"/%22/g
s/#/%23/g
s/\$/%24/g
s/\&/%26/g
s/'\''/%27/g
s/(/%28/g
s/)/%29/g
s/\*/%2a/g
s/+/%2b/g
s/,/%2c/g
s/-/%2d/g
s/\./%2e/g
s/\//%2f/g
s/:/%3a/g
s/;/%3b/g
s//%3e/g
s/?/%3f/g
s/@/%40/g
s/\[/%5b/g
s/\\/%5c/g
s/\]/%5d/g
s/\^/%5e/g
s/_/%5f/g
s/`/%60/g
s/{/%7b/g
s/|/%7c/g
s/}/%7d/g
s/~/%7e/g
s/      /%09/g

To use it do the following.

STR1=$(echo "https://www.example.com/change&$ ^this to?%checkthe@-functionality" | cut -d\? -f1)
STR2=$(echo "https://www.example.com/change&$ ^this to?%checkthe@-functionality" | cut -d\? -f2)
OUT2=$(echo "$STR2" | sed -f urlencode.sed)
echo "$STR1?$OUT2"

This will split the string into a part that needs encoding, and the part that is fine, encode the part that needs it, then stitches back together.

You can put that into a sh script for convenience, maybe have it take a parameter to encode, put it on your path and then you can just call:

urlencode https://www.exxample.com?isThisFun=HellNo

_source

---

Python 3 based on @sandro's good answer from 2010:

echo "Test & /me" | python -c "import urllib.parse;print (urllib.parse.quote(input()))"

Test%20%26%20/me

---

For those of you looking for a solution that doesn't need perl, here is one that only needs hexdump and awk:

url_encode() {
 [ $# -lt 1 ] && { return; }

 encodedurl="$1";

 # make sure hexdump exists, if not, just give back the url
 [ ! -x "/usr/bin/hexdump" ] && { return; }

 encodedurl=`
   echo $encodedurl | hexdump -v -e '1/1 "%02x\t"' -e '1/1 "%_c\n"' |
   LANG=C awk '
     $1 == "20"                    { printf("%s",   "+"); next } # space becomes plus
     $1 ~  /0[adAD]/               {                      next } # strip newlines
     $2 ~  /^[a-zA-Z0-9.*()\/-]$/  { printf("%s",   $2);  next } # pass through what we can
                                   { printf("%%%s", $1)        } # take hex value of everything else
   '`
}

Stitched together from a couple of places across the net and some local trial and error. It works great!

---

uni2ascii is very handy:

$ echo -ne '你好世界' | uni2ascii -aJ
%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C

---

You can emulate javascript's encodeURIComponent in perl. Here's the command:

perl -pe 's/([^a-zA-Z0-9_.!~*()'\''-])/sprintf("%%%02X", ord($1))/ge'

You could set this as a bash alias in .bash_profile:

alias encodeURIComponent='perl -pe '\''s/([^a-zA-Z0-9_.!~*()'\''\'\'''\''-])/sprintf("%%%02X",ord($1))/ge'\'

Now you can pipe into encodeURIComponent:

$ echo -n 'hèllo wôrld!' | encodeURIComponent
h%C3%A8llo%20w%C3%B4rld!

---

Simple PHP option:

echo 'part-that-needs-encoding' | php -R 'echo urlencode($argn);'

---

This nodejs-based answer will use encodeURIComponent on stdin:

uriencode_stdin() {
    node -p 'encodeURIComponent(require("fs").readFileSync(0))'
}

echo -n $'hello\nwörld' | uriencode_stdin
hello%0Aw%C3%B6rld

---

What would parse URLs better than javascript?

node -p "encodeURIComponent('$url')"

---

Here's the node version:

uriencode() {
  node -p "encodeURIComponent('${1//\'/\\\'}')"
}

---

The question is about doing this in bash and there's no need for python or perl as there is in fact a single command that does exactly what you want - "urlencode".

value=$(urlencode "${2}")

This is also much better, as the above perl answer, for example, doesn't encode all characters correctly. Try it with the long dash you get from Word and you get the wrong encoding.

Note, you need "gridsite-clients" installed to provide this command.

---

Another php approach:

echo "encode me" | php -r "echo urlencode(file_get_contents('php://stdin'));"

---

Here is a POSIX function to do that:

url_encode() {
   awk 'BEGIN {
      for (n = 0; n < 125; n++) {
         m[sprintf("%c", n)] = n
      }
      n = 1
      while (1) {
         s = substr(ARGV[1], n, 1)
         if (s == "") {
            break
         }
         t = s ~ /[[:alnum:]_.!~*\47()-]/ ? t s : t sprintf("%%%02X", m[s])
         n++
      }
      print t
   }' "$1"
}

Example:

value=$(url_encode "$2")

---

Ruby, for completeness

value="$(ruby -r cgi -e 'puts CGI.escape(ARGV[0])' "$2")"

---

Here is my version for busybox ash shell for an embedded system, I originally adopted Orwellophile's variant:

urlencode()
{
    local S="${1}"
    local encoded=""
    local ch
    local o
    for i in $(seq 0 $((${#S} - 1)) )
    do
        ch=${S:$i:1}
        case "${ch}" in
            [-_.~a-zA-Z0-9]) 
                o="${ch}"
                ;;
            *) 
                o=$(printf '%%%02x' "'$ch")                
                ;;
        esac
        encoded="${encoded}${o}"
    done
    echo ${encoded}
}

urldecode() 
{
    # urldecode <string>
    local url_encoded="${1//+/ }"
    printf '%b' "${url_encoded//%/\\x}"
}

---

Here's a one-line conversion using Lua, similar to blueyed's answer except with all the RFC 3986 Unreserved Characters left unencoded (like this answer):

url=$(echo 'print((arg[1]:gsub("([^%w%-%.%_%~])",function(c)return("%%%02X"):format(c:byte())end)))' | lua - "$1")

Additionally, you may need to ensure that newlines in your string are converted from LF to CRLF, in which case you can insert a gsub("\r?\n", "\r\n") in the chain before the percent-encoding.

Here's a variant that, in the non-standard style of application/x-www-form-urlencoded, does that newline normalization, as well as encoding spaces as '+' instead of '%20' (which could probably be added to the Perl snippet using a similar technique).

url=$(echo 'print((arg[1]:gsub("\r?\n", "\r\n"):gsub("([^%w%-%.%_%~ ]))",function(c)return("%%%02X"):format(c:byte())end):gsub(" ","+"))' | lua - "$1")

---

Having php installed I use this way:

URL_ENCODED_DATA=`php -r "echo urlencode('$DATA');"`

---