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c#asp.net-mvcbase64urlencodecase-sensitive
Hassan Faghihi
Hassan Faghihi

Reputation: 2031

case sensitive to URL case insensitive

I'm generating an encoded value to get passed within my URL, the issue is, our SEO manager configure the application, to pass lowercase URL, and he says he won't change the configuration. now i have to somehow encode my url, that uppercase, or whole string get encoded by their character code, so i can pass it without ruin the main value,

for example, my resulting base64 string is as following:

aHR0cDovL2xvY2FsaG9zdDoxMzUwL2hvdGVscy9nMy8xMzk1LTA1LTEwLzEvOTI3MjIyZmY
but it turn to be like this, when is passed to controller:
ahr0cdovl2xvy2fsag9zddoxmzuwl2hvdgvscy9nmy8xmzk1lta1ltewlzevoti3mjiyzmy

which can't be read... the case cause issue while decode.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3755

Answers (1)

starlight54
starlight54

Reputation: 1091

You cannot encode it using base64 if it will be transformed to lowercase out of your control, base64 relies upon using uppercase characters.

If the configuration your manager is insisting on is that incoming or outgoing query string parameters be incorrectly lower cased, however, you should inform him that he is in violation of the URI specification, specifically the query string section. Of course it is ultimately up to your own internal company choices whether you want only lower case in your internal URIs, but you should not assume that other applications handling URIs will operate like this.

As @sachin stated above, if you can make this a POST request (instead of a GET like I assume it is now), and provided that your manager is not lower casing those upon sending them as well :/ You can send this data via POST.

Alternatively, you could use Base32 instead to get around this, it does rely on uppercase characters only, but you can simply transform the recieved value to upper case upon recieveing it prior to decoding the (now Base32) string. This is a pretty ridiculous solution though...

Just to be clear: "lol" would encode in Base32 to "NRXWY===" which would then be lower cased to "nrxwy===" which you could then uppercase back to "NRXWY===" prior to decoding.

These are two NuGet packages that do Base32 encoding:

  1. Base32 as per RFC4648 here and the author claims it's tested and working correctly.

  2. Another package, which looks appealing because it supports zBase32 here, the advantage with zBase32 is that it already uses lowercase characters only, so you won't have to worry about changing the case. The porter/author has included instructions on how to get zBase32 encoding

Both of the these (Base32 and zBase32) use a subset of Base64 characters, so they'll both work fine with URIs, all of the charcaters used are valid in URIs (the utf-8 content is irrelevant since you're just encoding bytes, so you'll get the same bytes back when you decode from Base32)

Upvotes: 4

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