When are you supposed to use escape instead of encodeURI / encodeURIComponent?

Question

When encoding a query string to be sent to a web server - when do you use escape() and when do you use encodeURI() or encodeURIComponent()

Answer 1

I recommend not to use one of those methods as is. Write your own function which does the right thing.

MDN has given a good example on url encoding shown below.

var fileName = 'my file(2).txt';
var header = "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename*=UTF-8''" + encodeRFC5987ValueChars(fileName);

console.log(header); 
// logs "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename*=UTF-8''my%20file%282%29.txt"


function encodeRFC5987ValueChars (str) {
    return encodeURIComponent(str).
        // Note that although RFC3986 reserves "!", RFC5987 does not,
        // so we do not need to escape it
        replace(/['()]/g, escape). // i.e., %27 %28 %29
        replace(/\*/g, '%2A').
            // The following are not required for percent-encoding per RFC5987, 
            //  so we can allow for a little better readability over the wire: |`^
            replace(/%(?:7C|60|5E)/g, unescape);
}

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/encodeURIComponent