Android Link Error Web page not available asp .net

Question

My app is an asp .net vb app. The link appears to work in any browser...except Android.

Here is the dynamic link: http://rentonlive.com/TandL.aspx?xid=106&xtitle=RED%LIGHT%CAMERAS%READER%SURVEY

What is Android looking for? If this is a basic question that I could have figured out elsewhere please guide me after you help me with this issue.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I've tried this in the Dolphin browser on Android and that link opens fine. I see a survey relating to red lights. This may therefore be an issue with the specific Android device you tested on, but I think both the cause and the fix are under your control.

Certainly one big problem here is the URL format. Your URL query string parameter xtitle is set to a string that contains % characters. The % character has a special meaning in URLs, it means the following two characters form a HEX character code. So for example if you had xtitle=cat%20and%20dog that sets the xtitle string to "cat and dog" because %20 is the hex encoding for a space character (ASCII character 20).

Your URL is invalid and does not conform the the RFC definition, so it is not reasonable to expect it to work across all browser. I am surprised it works at all in any browser as it completely is wrong - you cannot put any string into a URL parameter, it must be processed first.

You need to properly encode your query string parameters before you add them to the URL string. There is a method in ASP.NET to URL encode a string before you add it to a parameter. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zttxte6w.aspx

For more information about the URL standard look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator

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