How to detect if a string is encoded with escape() or encodeURIComponent()

Question

I have a web service that receives data from various clients. Some of them sends the data encoded using escape(), while the others instead use encodeURIComponent(). Is there a way to detect the encoding used to escape the data?

Answer 1

Encourage your clients to use encodeURIComponent(). See this page for an explanation: Comparing escape(), encodeURI(), and encodeURIComponent(). If you really want to try to figure out exactly how something was encoded, you can try to look for some of the characters that escape() and encodeURI() do not encode.