DelphiDabbler's Blog

Arrgh! I've been having a lot of problems with the CodeSnip program's database update code - it's been working for some and not for others. All this has happened since I converted the program to Unicode and compiled with Delphi 2010. I'm posting this for two reasons: To try to explain to long suffering users what has been going on with program lately - it's not usually this flaky. To forewarn anyone about to fall down the same hole as I have. The problem never raised its head on my system, but did on some that don't use the Windows-1252 code page. The problem was caused by a checksum failure, which in turn was caused by the downloaded data being converted to the wrong code page before the checksum got calculated: result - bang - bad checksum. My code relies on Indy components to translate downloaded content into text - and Indy and I make different assumptions about how this should be done. And I'm not sure either of us was correct, but they ar

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Time to complete the set. So far in this series I have presented URIEncode , URIDecode and URIEncodeQueryString . So here's the missing piece of the jigsaw: URIDecodeQueryString . This routine decodes a query string that has been "query-string-encoded". If you look at URL Encoding revisited you'll see that a query string is encoded with normal URI encoding, except that space characters are encoded using '+' characters instead of '%20' . So, to decode a query string we first need to replace literal '+' characters with spaces. Because the string is still URI encoded we should replace ocurrences of '+' with '%20' , not the actual space character. Once this is done we are left with a standard URI encoded string which we decode as normal. Here's the code: function URIDecodeQueryString ( const Str : string ) : string ; begin Result := URIDecode ( ReplaceStr ( Str , '+' , '%20' ) ) ; end ;

To complement the code of my URL Encoding post , I've now developed a URIDecode routine. It attempts to decode URIs that were percent-encoded according to RFC 3986 . It also allows for some malformed percent-encoded URIs, i.e. those that contain characters outside the RFC's "unreserved" character set. Here's the code. An explanation follows. function URIDecode ( const Str : string ) : string ; // Counts number of '%' characters in a UTF8 string function CountPercent ( const S : UTF8String ) : Integer ; var Idx : Integer ; // loops thru all octets of S begin Result := 0 ; for Idx := 1 to Length ( S ) do if S [ Idx ] = cPercent then Inc ( Result ) ; end ; var SrcUTF8 : UTF8String ; // input string as UTF-8 SrcIdx : Integer ; // index into source UTF-8 string ResUTF8 : UTF8String ; // output string as UTF-8 ResIdx : Integer ; // index into result UT

In my previous post I covered URI encoding part of a URI or URL. What I didn't cover was the almost trivial case of encoding a query string. The only difference is that spaces in a query string are converted to reserved '+' characters that are not then percent encoded. The only complication arises when the query string to be encoded already contains '+' symbols. They must be percent-encoded so they are not confused with the symbols that are used to replace spaces. In the original version of this post I completely misunderstood this and presented code that percent-encoded both literal and space-replacement '+' symbols. Unfortunately percent-encoding at this stage also encodes spaces as %20 . We fix this by simply replacing each occurence of %20 with a '+' symbol. Here's the code: it's a very simple function that encodes a query string value passed as a UTF-8 string parameter: function URIEncodeQueryString ( const S : UTF8St

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