Matching escaped spaces using JavaScript indexOf

Question

I have the following JavaScript code:

var matchArray = [];
var passedUrl = '/' + url;
var tabLink;

$('.uiAjaxTabs li a').each(function () {
    if (passedUrl.indexOf($(this).attr('href')) == 0) {
        boverlap_penalty = passedUrl.replace($(this).attr('href'), '').length;
        matchArray.push({ 'score': boverlap_penalty, 'dom_obj': this });
    }
});

if (matchArray.length) {
    tabLink = matchArray.sort(function (a, b) {
        return (a.score < b.score) ? -1 : 1
    }).shift().dom_obj;
}

$(tabLink).parents('li').addClass('loading');

Which takes a passedUrl and then matches it up with a set of links to see which most closely matches the url, and then adds a class of loading to it.

This works fine EXCEPT if the link has a space in it e.g. domain.com/People?Name=John Doe because the browser sees it as domain.com/People?Name=John%20Doe and therefore doesn't match it correctly when the passedUrl has the escaped spaces and the link does not.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Please provide a testcase with some values for `$(this).attr('href')`, the `url` you're using, and the expected result. — Bergi, Jun 27 '13 at 16:02

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 27 '13 at 15:57

1

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Use

var passedUrl = decodeURI('/' + url);

See MDN docs.

answered Jun 27 '13 at 15:57

Bergi

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 27 '13 at 15:45

0

Try JavaScript's unescape function, it seem to decode URL-encoded strings.

answered Jun 27 '13 at 15:45

artahian

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Check [decodeURIComponent vs unescape, what is wrong with unescape?](http://stackoverflow.com/q/619323/1048572) – Bergi Jun 27 '13 at 15:51

Matching escaped spaces using JavaScript indexOf

2 Answers2