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 have this function...

var escapeURIparam = function(url) {
    if (encodeURIComponent) url = encodeURIComponent(url);
    else if (encodeURI) url = encodeURI(url);
    else url = escape(url);
    url = url.replace(/\+/g, '%2B'); // Force the replacement of "+"
    return url;
};