I need to URL-encode a string in AppleScript - applescript

Question

My script searches a website for songs, but when there are spaces it doesn't search, you have to add underscores. I was wondering if there was a way to replace my spaces with underscores.
Could you please use my current code below to show me how to do it?
set search to text returned of (display dialog "Enter song you wish to find" default answer "" buttons {"Search", "Cancel"} default button 1)
open location "http://www.mp3juices.com/search/" & search
end

Answer 1

Note: The solution no longer works as of Big Sur (macOS 11) - it sounds like a bug; do tell us if you have more information.
Try the following:
set search to text returned of (display dialog "Enter song you wish to find" default answer "" buttons {"Search", "Cancel"} default button 1)
do shell script "open 'http://www.mp3juices.com/search/'" & quoted form of search
end
What you need is URL encoding (i.e., encoding of a string for safe inclusion in a URL), which involves more than just replacing spaces.
The open command-line utility, thankfully, performs this encoding for you, so you can just pass it the string directly; you need do shell script to invoke open, and quoted form of ensures that the string is passed through unmodified (to be URI-encoded by open later).
As you'll see, the kind of URL encoding open performs replaces spaces with %20, not underscores, but that should still work.

Answer 2

mklement0's answer is correct about url encoding but mp3juices uses RESTful URLs (clean URLs). RESTful URLs want's to keep the URL human readable and you won't see/use typical hex values in your url presenting an ASCII number. A snake_case, as you have mentioned (is false), but it is pretty common to use an substitution for whitespaces (%20) (and other characters) in RESTful URLs. However the slug of an RESTful must be converted to RESTful's own RESTful encoding before it can be handled by standard URL encoding.
set search to text returned of (display dialog "Enter song you wish to find" default answer "" buttons {"Search", "Cancel"} default button 1)
set search to stringReplace(search, space, "-")
do shell script "open 'http://www.mp3juices.com/search/'" & quoted form of search
on stringReplace(theText, searchString, replaceString)
set {oldTID, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, searchString}
set textItems to every text item of theText
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to replaceString
set newText to textItems as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to oldTID
return newText
end stringReplace
EDIT: updated the code, unlike the question mentioned that spaces are converted to underscores, mp3juice uses hyphens as substitution for whitespaces.

Answer 3

An update on this, despite the fact that the answer is 3 years old, as I faced the same problem: on recent versions of macOS/OS X/Mac OS X (I think, 10.10 or later), you can use ASOC, the AppleScript/Objective-C bridge:
use framework "Foundation"
urlEncode("my search string with [{?#äöü or whatever characters")
on urlEncode(input)
tell current application's NSString to set rawUrl to stringWithString_(input)
set theEncodedURL to rawUrl's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 -- 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding
return theEncodedURL as Unicode text
end urlEncode
It should be noted that stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding is deprecated, but it will take some time until it’s removed from macOS.

Answer 4

URL encoding in AppleScript
For a general use case (for me at the moment to pass any ASCII url containing chars like #, &, ß, ö to the bit.ly API), I stumbled upon a nice code snippet that instantly added full support to my ShortURL clipboard pasting shortcut. Here's a quote from source:
i was looking for a quick and dirty way to encode some data to pass to a url via POST or GET with applescript and Internet Explorer, there were a few OSAXen which have that ability, but i didn't feel like installing anything, so i wrote this thing (works with standard ascii characters, characters above ascii 127 may run into character set issues see: applescript for converting macroman to windows-1252 encoding)
Notes
Double encoding should be duly noted.
Not tested on non-ASCII URLs.
Tested on OS X 10.8.5.
Code
on urlencode(theText)
set theTextEnc to ""
repeat with eachChar in characters of theText
set useChar to eachChar
set eachCharNum to ASCII number of eachChar
if eachCharNum = 32 then
set useChar to "+"
else if (eachCharNum ≠ 42) and (eachCharNum ≠ 95) and (eachCharNum < 45 or eachCharNum > 46) and (eachCharNum < 48 or eachCharNum > 57) and (eachCharNum < 65 or eachCharNum > 90) and (eachCharNum < 97 or eachCharNum > 122) then
set firstDig to round (eachCharNum / 16) rounding down
set secondDig to eachCharNum mod 16
if firstDig > 9 then
set aNum to firstDig + 55
set firstDig to ASCII character aNum
end if
if secondDig > 9 then
set aNum to secondDig + 55
set secondDig to ASCII character aNum
end if
set numHex to ("%" & (firstDig as string) & (secondDig as string)) as string
set useChar to numHex
end if
set theTextEnc to theTextEnc & useChar as string
end repeat
return theTextEnc
end urlencode

Answer 5

If you need to get the URL as a string (not just feed it into open which does a nifty job of encoding for you) and you're not above using a little Automator, you can throw some JavaScript into your AppleScript:
encodeURIComponent is a built in JavaScript function - it is a complete solution for encoding components of URIs.
For copy/pasters, here are all three scripts in the above Automator chain:
on run {input, parameters}
return text returned of (display dialog "Enter song you wish to find" default answer "" buttons {"Search", "Cancel"} default button 1)
end run
function run(input, parameters) {
return encodeURIComponent(input);
}
on run {input, parameters}
display dialog "http://www.mp3juices.com/search/" & input buttons {"okay!"} default button 1
end run

Answer 6

I was hunting around for URL encoding and decoding and came across this helpful link.
Which you can use like so:
set theurl to "https://twitter.com/zackshapiro?format=json"
do shell script "php -r 'echo urlencode(\"" & theurl & "\");'"
# gives me "https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fzackshapiro%3Fformat%3Djson"
set theurl to "https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fzackshapiro%3Fformat%3Djson"
return do shell script "php -r 'echo urldecode(\"" & theurl & "\");'"
# gives me "https://twitter.com/zackshapiro?format=json"
Or as functions:
on encode(str)
do shell script "php -r 'echo urlencode(\"" & str & "\");'"
end encode
on decode(str)
do shell script "php -r 'echo urldecode(\"" & str & "\");'"
end decode

Answer 7

Just so it's said, AppleScriptObjC allows us to use NSString to do the encoding. The script is complicated by the fact that different parts of the URL allow different characters (all of which I've added options for) but in most cases the 'query' option will be used.
See NSCharacterSet's dev page (the section called "Getting Character Sets for URL Encoding") for descriptions of the various URL parts.
use AppleScript version "2.4" -- Yosemite 10.10 or later
use framework "Foundation"
property NSString : class "NSString"
property NSCharacterSet : class "NSCharacterSet"
-- example usage
my percentEncode:"some text" ofType:"query"
on percentEncode:someText ofType:encodeType
set unencodedString to NSString's stringWithString:someText
set allowedCharSet to my charSetForEncodeType:encodeType
set encodedString to unencodedString's stringByAddingPercentEncodingWithAllowedCharacters:allowedCharSet
return encodedString as text
end percentEncode:ofType:
on charSetForEncodeType:encodeType
if encodeType is "path" then
return NSCharacterSet's URLPathAllowedCharacterSet()
else if encodeType is "query" then
return NSCharacterSet's URLQueryAllowedCharacterSet()
else if encodeType is "fragment" then
return NSCharacterSet's URLFragmentAllowedCharacterSet()
else if encodeType is "host" then
return NSCharacterSet's URLHostAllowedCharacterSet()
else if encodeType is "user" then
return NSCharacterSet's URLUserAllowedCharacterSet()
else if encodeType is "password" then
return NSCharacterSet's URLPasswordAllowedCharacterSet()
else
return missing value
end if
end charSetForEncodeType:

Answer 8

The Python Approach:
Find your python3 path (which python3) or if you don't have it, install using brew or miniconda
Now try this:
python_path = /path/to/python3
set search_query to "testy test"
tell application "Google Chrome"
set win to make new window
open location "https://www.google.com/search?q=" & url_encode(q)
end tell
on url_encode(input)
return (do shell script "echo " & input & " | " & python_path & " -c \"import urllib.parse, sys; print(urllib.parse.quote(sys.stdin.read()))\"
")
end url_encode
credits to #Murphy https://stackoverflow.com/a/56321886