I'm trying window.open with a url with spaces:

var msg = 'Hello, world!';  
var url = '';  
var link = '=' + msg + '&url=' + url; 
window.open(link);

Running this code will open a new window with ,%2520world!&url=.

What happens is that the space in msg is converted to %20, then the '%' is converted to %25. As a workaround, i added:

msg = msg.replace(/\s/g, '+');

But are there other chars i need to watch out for or is there a better workaround?

I'm trying window.open with a url with spaces:

var msg = 'Hello, world!';  
var url = 'http://yoursite.com';  
var link = 'http://www.twitter.com/share?text=' + msg + '&url=' + url; 
window.open(link);

Running this code will open a new window with http://twitter.com/share?text=Hello,%2520world!&url=http://yoursite.com.

What happens is that the space in msg is converted to %20, then the '%' is converted to %25. As a workaround, i added:

msg = msg.replace(/\s/g, '+');

But are there other chars i need to watch out for or is there a better workaround?

• javascript
• escaping
• spaces
• window.open

• i forgot to add that i'm using Drupal with jQuery. This code is wrapped within a Drupal.behaviors...not that i think these affect anything. – nymo Commented Mar 15, 2011 at 22:04

3 Answers 3

Try this instead:

var msg = encodeURIComponent('Hello, world!');  
var url = encodeURIComponent('http://www.google.com');  
var link = 'http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=' + msg + '&url=' + url; 
window.open(link); 

Note the different Twitter url and the encoding of the query string params.

you have to encode URLs.

There cannot be any spaces in the URL.

Therefore the browser reinterprets the url spaces as it wants unless you tell it exactly how:

var msg = 'Hello,%20world!';

I had the same problem. It seems that if you use the url http://www.twitter.com your msg gets escaped twice. If you look at twitters dev page, they use https://twitter.com.

For your code, remove the www and I think it's good to use https instead of http

var msg = 'Hello, world!';  
var url = 'http://yoursite.com';  
var link = 'https://twitter.com/share?text=' + msg + '&url=' + url; 
window.open(link);

You don't even need to use encodeURI or escape on your message.