URL-encoded slash in URL

Question

My Map is:

routes.MapRoute(
   "Default",                                             // Route name
   "{controller}/{action}/{id}",                          // URL with params
   new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" } // Param defaults
);

If I use the URL http://localhost:5000/Home/About/100%2f200 there is no matching route. I change the URL to http://localhost:5000/Home/About/100 then the route is matched again.

Is there any easy way to work with parameters that contain slashes? Other escaped values (space %20) seem to work.

EDIT:

To encode Base64 works for me. It makes the URL ugly, but that's OK for now.

public class UrlEncoder
{ 
    public string URLDecode(string  decode)
    {
        if (decode == null) return null;
        if (decode.StartsWith("="))
        {
            return FromBase64(decode.TrimStart('='));
        }
        else
        {
            return HttpUtility.UrlDecode( decode) ;
        }
    }

    public string UrlEncode(string encode)
    {
        if (encode == null) return null;
        string encoded = HttpUtility.PathEncode(encode);
        if (encoded.Replace("%20", "") == encode.Replace(" ", ""))
        {
            return encoded;
        }
        else
        {
            return "=" + ToBase64(encode);
        }
    }

    public string ToBase64(string encode)
    {
        Byte[] btByteArray = null;
        UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
        btByteArray = encoding.GetBytes(encode);
        string sResult = System.Convert.ToBase64String(btByteArray, 0, btByteArray.Length);
        sResult = sResult.Replace("+", "-").Replace("/", "_");
        return sResult;
    }

    public string FromBase64(string decode)
    {
        decode = decode.Replace("-", "+").Replace("_", "/");
        UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
        return encoding.GetString(Convert.FromBase64String(decode));
    }
}

EDIT1:

At the end it turned out that the best way was to save a nicely formated string for each item I need to select. Thats much better because now I only encode values and never decode them. All special characters become "-". A lot of my db-tables now have this additional column "URL". The data is pretty stable, thats why I can go this way. I can even check, if the data in "URL" is unique.

EDIT2:

Also watch out for space character. It looks ok on VS integrated webserver but is different on iis7 Properly url encode space character

Answer 1

If it's only your last parameter, you could do:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Default",                                                // Route name
    "{controller}/{action}/{*id}",                            // URL with parameters
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" });  // Parameter defaults

Answer 2

Just use Server.UrlDecode. It will work, I've tested.

Answer 3

You can avoid the double encoding/decoding suggestions above and simply use HttpServerUtility.UrlTokenEncode and the corresponding UrlTokenDecode.