The URL-DECODE directive decodes a string from the application/x-www-form-urlencoded
MIME format to a string.
url-decode <column>
The <column>
contains an encoded URL to be decoded.
The conversion process is the reverse of that used by the URL-ENCODE
directive. It is assumed that all characters in the encoded string are one of the
following: a
through z
, A
through Z
, 0
through 9
, and -
, _
, .
, and *
.
The character %
is allowed but is interpreted as the start of a special escaped sequence.
See https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4.1 for details.
These rules are applied in the conversion:
- The alphanumeric characters
a
throughz
,A
throughZ
, and0
through9
remain unchanged - The special characters
.
,-
,*
, and_
remain unchanged - The plus sign (
+
) is converted into a space character - A sequence of the form
%xy
will be treated as representing a byte wherexy
is the two-digit hexadecimal representation of the 8-bit byte. Then, all substrings that contain one or more of these byte sequences consecutively will be replaced by the character(s) whose encoding would result in those consecutive bytes. The encoding scheme used to decode these characters may be specified, or if unspecified, the default encoding of the platform will be used.
Note: Uses UTF-8 as the decoding scheme for the string.