Powershell - Invoke-WebRequest to a URL with literal '/' (/) in it

Question

I have been trying to access a URL with a / character in it from powershell, using the following command (it\'s a query to a gitlab server to retrieve a project ca

Answer 1

I have encountered similar issue in PowerShell 5.1. My purpose was to get a single project by Git Lab Web API. As Web API described:

Get single project
Get a specific project, identified by project ID or NAMESPACE/PROJECT_NAME , which is owned by the authentication user. If using namespaced projects call make sure that the NAMESPACE/PROJECT_NAME is URL-encoded, eg. /api/v3/projects/diaspora%2Fdiaspora (where / is represented by %2F).

What different with nik was that my Invoke-WebRequest call was successful by directly invoke but failed inside a Job. Here's the code:

Start-Job -ScriptBlock {
    try{
        Invoke-WebRequest https://server.com/api/v3/projects/foo%2Fbar -verbose
    } catch {
        Write-Output $_.Exception
    }
}

To Get the output inside a Job. Run command:

> Get-Job | Receive-Job -Keep

And exception as below:

VERBOSE: GET https://server.com/api/v3/projects/foo/bar with 0-byte payload
System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.
  at Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WebRequestPSCmdlet.GetResponse(WebRequest request)
  at Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WebRequestPSCmdlet.ProcessRecord()

And thanks Oleg SH's answer. My problem was solved. But I think there might be a bug in the Start-Job cmdlet

---

Environment: Windows 7

>$PSVersionTable

Name                           Value
----                           -----
PSVersion                      5.1.14409.1005
PSEdition                      Desktop
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}
BuildVersion                   10.0.14409.1005
CLRVersion                     4.0.30319.42000
WSManStackVersion              3.0
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1