CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.netencoding
RC1140
RC1140

Reputation: 8663

Server.UrlEncode vs Uri.EscapeDataString

What exactly is the difference between the two functions. The output seems similar except the Uri.EscapeUriString encodes spaces to %20 and Server.UrlEncode encodes them as a + sign.

And the final question which should be used preferably

Upvotes: 55

Views: 29358

Answers (2)

Alex from Jitbit
Alex from Jitbit

Reputation: 60616

I found that HttpUtility.UrlEncode is tolerant to null strings and long strings. It's available both in .NET Core and .NET Framework.

But I also found that Uri.EscapeDataString is 4X faster and uses less memory

Method Mean Error StdDev Gen0 Allocated
EscapeDataString 19.52 ns 0.333 ns 0.018 ns - -
HttpUtilityUrlEncode 88.69 ns 41.303 ns 2.264 ns 0.0191 120 B

Upvotes: 6

It-Z
It-Z

Reputation: 2000

If any one will came across this in the future:

After some digging I have found out that Uri.EscapeDataString is the preferable option. See the the highest voted answer here and this post.

EDIT: Adding the information from the second link here:

We found that in some cases you need to consider using Uri.EscapeDataString. In our case we are encrypting the querystring and found that UrlDecode is converting a plus (+) to space. This was causing us errors during decryption. Using Uri’s Escape and UnescapeDataString makes sense for us when constructing a custom querystring in the URL.

Upvotes: 37

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