RESTful url in android with (') - url

I am developing an android application and I am using a RESTful service to connect to SQL azure database. I need to use this RESTful url:
http://example.com/wcfDataService1.svc/wn_synset?$filter=word%20eq%20'child's_game'&$select=synset_id,w_num,word,ss_type,wn_gloss/gloss&$expand=wn_gloss
As you can see am looking for this word (child's_game) in the table wn_synset.
The problem is the single quote (') in child's_game. As you can see it puts the word inside quotes '...' so when it finds the quote in child's_game it thinks it is the end of the word and the rest is error.
How can i solve this problem?

You can url-encode the ' symbols with %27. See http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp and try it in the "Try it yourself" section.
Edit: (moved correct guess from comments to the answer itself)
Or is it just, that the SQL-Server on the server side gets it wrong? Like it builds a select * from wn_synset where word = 'child's game' and there's the error? Then you'll have to look up how you escape single quotes for your database -- probably it's by using two single quotes (''), so perhaps try to send child''s game instead of child's game.

There is no problem, or in other words, your URL is not a URL. If it were a URL, ther wouldn't be a '. Of course, you can have this ' in your URL, so to speak. But it needs to be escaped in accordance with the rules for URLs. You may want to look at URLEncoder and Uri.

Related

What is si=a or si=fc, etc in my soundcloud link? [duplicate]

https://www.airbnb.com/help?audience=host?audience=guest?audience=host?audience=host?audience=host
The URL above was created occasionally by me.
A normal URL to me has one question mark while all parameters are distinct. So in my opinion, this URL is abnormal.
What seems weird to me is that it still works and my browser has no complaint about it.
Would anyone explain it to me?
The first ? indicates the query component. The query component is terminated by the first following #, or the end of the URL.
So, this is the query component of your URL:
audience=host?audience=guest?audience=host?audience=host?audience=host
Within the query component, it’s perfectly fine to use ? characters, they don’t have any special meaning there (list of all allowed characters in the query).
While parameters in the query typically are in the name=value format, separated by &, this is just a convention (it’s what the encoding type application/x-www-form-urlencoded in HTML forms produces). Site authors can use whatever format they want.

What language is this Salesforce code that I need to wrap?

I'm working on a Salesforce coding issue. Let me preface this by saying I'm not a developer or Salesforce expert.
What language is this?
Data Type FormulaThis formula references multiple objects
IF (Fulfillment_Submission_Form_URL__c <> "" && CONTAINS(Fulfillment_Submission_Form_URL__c, "qualtrics"),
Fulfillment_Submission_Form_URL__c &
(IF (CONTAINS(Fulfillment_Submission_Form_URL__c,"?SID="), "&", "?")) &
(IF (CONTAINS(TEXT(Type__c), "Site Visit"),
"ContactId="&Statement_of_Work__r.Contractor_Contact__c&
"&CoachType="&SUBSTITUTE(Statement_of_Work__r.Work_Type__r.Name," ","%20")&
"&CoachName="&SUBSTITUTE(Statement_of_Work__r.Contractor_Name__c," ","%20")&
"&InitPartId="&Initiative_Participation__r.Id&
"&InstitutionName="&substitute(substitute(SUBSTITUTE(Institution_Name__c," ","%20"),")",""),"(","")&
"&AccountId="&Initiative_Participation__r.Participating_Institution__r.Id&
"&TodaysDate="&TEXT(TODAY())&
"&SOWLineItemId="&Id&
"&LeaderCollege="&Initiative_Participation__r.ATD_Leader_College_Status__c&
"&SVRCompleted="&TEXT(Count_of_Site_Visit_Fulfillments__c)&
"&SVRRequired="&TEXT(Number_of_Work_Units_Allocated__c),
IF (CONTAINS(TEXT(Type__c), "Feedback"),
"InitPartId="&Initiative_Participation__r.Id&
"&SOWLineItemId="&Id&
"&ReportYear="&Statement_of_Work__r.SOW_Year__c&
"&UserId="&Contractor_User_Id__c&
"&InstitutionName="&substitute(substitute(SUBSTITUTE(Institution_Name__c," ","%20"),")",""),"(",""),
"")
))
,"")
Essentially it's pulling a link from another product we've integrated it with. We then take the basic link and reformat it to add parameters.
The problem is when it pulls in some parameters (ex: CoachName) the Coach entered their name in strange formats like: John (Coach) Doe.
So when the script outputs a URL that includes parameters it breaks at the &CoachName=John%20(Coach)% portion of the URL. Any easy way to work around this by modifying the script? Unfortunately we DO need that (Coach) identifier because the system we push to grabs that as well.
It's formula syntax, I'd compare it to Excel-like formulas. There's self-paced training if you don't want to read documentation. And as it's not exactly code-related you may have more luck on dedicated site, https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/. More admins lurk there.
So you do want that "(Coach)" to go through but it breaks the link? Looks like ( is a special character. It's not technically wrong to have unescaped parentheses, if it breaks that other site you might want to contact them and get their act together. RFC doesn't force us to encode them but looks like you'll have to to solve it at least in the short term: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/78110/is-it-bad-to-use-parentheses-in-a-url
Instead of poor man's encoding (SUBSTITUTE(Statement_of_Work__r.Contractor_Name__c," ","%20") try using proper URLENCODE(Statement_of_Work__r.Contractor_Name__c).
Or there's bit more "pro" function called URLFOR but the documentation doesn't make it very clear how powerful the 3rd parameter is with the braces [key1 = value1, key2 = value2] syntax. Basically just pass the parameters and let SF worry about encoding special characters etc.
Read my answer https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/a/46445/799 and there are some examples on the net like https://support.docusign.com/s/articles/DFS-URL-buttons-for-Lightning-basic-setup-limitations?language=en_US&rsc_301

Slack slash commands - Variable/Parameters

I'm integrating slack with jenkins to use slash commands and want to know if slash commands have variables
What I want to do is something like this;
/this_word_should_be_in_the_url word
and the be able to use word in the URL the slash command will call.
On their page they have something like /weather 94070
Do I have access to the 94070 and somehow set is as a query parameter for the URL.
Is this possible?
Can't find any documentation of this.
Thanks.
Yes. You will have access to the word as per the example that you mentioned.
So for example, if you have the following:
/this_word_should_be_in_the_url word
Then there will be an additional query parameter named text that will contain everything else after the slash command. If you just have one parameter then it should be simple to just trim and use the text query parameter but if you have multiple words and need to split them into something more meaningful, then you might have to use some regex or simple string split function.
It is documented at How do commands work. In this section they have provided the various query parameters that will get passed to your Slash Command External URL. For the weather example, the data posted as per the documentation is:
token=gIkuvaNzQIHg97ATvDxqgjtO
team_id=T0001
team_domain=example
channel_id=C2147483705
channel_name=test
user_id=U2147483697
user_name=Steve
command=/weather
text=94070
response_url=https://hooks.slack.com/commands/1234/5678
Notice the text parameter in the above list.

What is the proper way to sanitize user input when using a Ruby system call?

I have a Ruby on Rails Application that is using the X virtual framebuffer along with another program to grab images from the web. I have structured my command as shown below:
xvfb-run --server-args=-screen 0 1024x768x24 /my/c++/app #{user_provided_url}
What is the best way to make this call in rails with the maximum amount of safety from user input?
You probably don't need to sanitize this input in rails. If it's a URL and it's in a string format then it already has properly escaped characters to be passed as a URL to a Net::HTTP call. That said, you could write a regular expression to check that the URL looks valid. You could also do the following to make sure that the URL is parse-able:
uri = URI.parse(user_provided_url)
You can then query the object for it's relevant parts:
uri.path
uri.host
uri.port
Maybe I'm wrong, but why don't you just make sure that the string given is really an URL (URI::parse), surround it with single quotes and escape any single quote (') character that appears inside?

ASP.NET MVC Colon in URL

I've seen that IIS has a problem with letting colons into URLs. I also saw the suggestions others offered here.
With the site I'm working on, I want to be able to pass titles of movies, books, etc., into my URL, colon included, like this:
mysite.com/Movie/Bob:The Return
This would be consumed by my MovieController, for example, as a string and used further down the line.
I realize that a colon is not ideal. Does anyone have any other suggestions? As poor as it currently is, I'm doing a find-and-replace from all colons (:) to another character, then a backwards replace when I want to consume it on the Controller end.
I resolved this issue by adding this to my web.config:
<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=""/>
This must be within the system.web section.
The default is:
<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?"/>
So to only make an exception for the colon it would become
<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="<,>,*,%,&,\,?"/>
Read more at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.configuration.httpruntimesection.requestpathinvalidcharacters.aspx
For what I understand the colon character is acceptable as an unencoded character in an URL. I don't know why they added it to the default of the requestPathInvalidCharacters.
Consider URL encoding and decoding your movie titles.
You'd end up with foo.com/bar/Bob%58The%20Return
As an alternative, consider leveraging an HTML helper to remove URL unfriendly characters in URLs (method is URLFriendly()). The SEO benefits between a colon and a placeholder (e.g. a dash) would likely be negligable.
One of the biggest worries with your approach is that the movie name isn't always going to be unique (e.g. "The Italian Job"). Also what about other ilegal characters (e.g. brackets etc).
It might be a good idea to use an id number in the url to locate the movie in your database. You could still include a url friendly copy of movie name in your url, but you wouldn't need to worry about getting back to the original title with all the illegal characters in it.
A good example is the url to this page. You can see that removing the title of the page still works:
ASP.NET MVC Colon in URL
ASP.NET MVC Colon in URL
Colon is a reserved and invalid character in an URI according to the RFC 3986. So don't do something that violates the specification. You need to either URL encode it or use another character. And here's a nice blog post you might take a look at.
The simplest way is to use System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode() when building the url
and System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlDecode when interpreting the results coming back. You would also have problems with the space character if you don't encode the value first.

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