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coldfusioncoldfusion-2016

Why does cflocation strip characters and not visit the URL?

I have a URL stored as:

<cfset VisitURL = 'http://www.toysexample.com/search.aspx?searchBox=christmasgifts≠Sort=high&search=new' />

(The above URL string actually comes from a database field that I have no control over)

When I ask cflocation to visit the above URL like this:

<cflocation url="#EncodeForURL(VisitURL)#" addtoken="no" />

It visits the URL as a subfolder within my site. So I end up going to the URL http://www.volumeoneexample.com/http:/www.toysexample.com/search.aspx?searchBox=christmasgifts≠Sort=high&search=new

As you can see it has dropped one of the forward-slashes from the http:// part and also appended the URL as a folder within my site. I don't get why its doing this?

Solution

  • As mentioned in the comments, you're "over encoding". The EncodeForURL() should only be on the URL parameters.

    Since you're not able to retrieve the URL and parameters separately, you might be able to get away with treating them like a list.

    <cflocation url="#ListFirst(VisitURL,"?")#?#EncodeForURL(ListRest(VisitURL,"?"))#" />

    If things get a little wonky you'll need to do more manipulation than that.