URL Encoding using C#

Question

I have an application which sends a POST request to the VB forum software and logs someone in (without setting cookies or anything).

Once the user is logged in I cre

Answer 1

Ideally these would go in a class called "FileNaming" or maybe just rename Encode to "FileNameEncode". Note: these are not designed to handle Full Paths, just the folder and/or file names. Ideally you would Split("/") your full path first and then check the pieces. And obviously instead of a union, you could just add the "%" character to the list of chars not allowed in Windows, but I think it's more helpful/readable/factual this way. Decode() is exactly the same but switches the Replace(Uri.HexEscape(s[0]), s) "escaped" with the character.

public static List urlEncodedCharacters = new List
{
  "/", "\\", "<", ">", ":", "\"", "|", "?", "%" //and others, but not *
};
//Since this is a superset of urlEncodedCharacters, we won't be able to only use UrlEncode() - instead we'll use HexEncode
public static List specialCharactersNotAllowedInWindows = new List
{
  "/", "\\", "<", ">", ":", "\"", "|", "?", "*" //windows dissallowed character set
};

    public static string Encode(string fileName)
    {
        //CheckForFullPath(fileName); // optional: make sure it's not a path?
        List charactersToChange = new List(specialCharactersNotAllowedInWindows);
        charactersToChange.AddRange(urlEncodedCharacters.
            Where(x => !urlEncodedCharacters.Union(specialCharactersNotAllowedInWindows).Contains(x)));   // add any non duplicates (%)

        charactersToChange.ForEach(s => fileName = fileName.Replace(s, Uri.HexEscape(s[0])));   // "?" => "%3f"

        return fileName;
    }

Thanks @simon-tewsi for the very usefull table above!