Encode ampersand (&) in URL for "Open URL", and prevent Alfred from encoding it a second time

[Gary King]

I'm passing a URL to "Open URL" to open. The URL has an ampersand that I want to encode, because otherwise it's treated as part of the URL's query string. However, when I encode it as %26, Alfred encodes that again, therefore making it %2526.

 

How can I stop Alfred from encoding it a second time?

[vitor]

How are you passing the URL? The Open URL object has checkboxes regarding what it encodes; untick what you don’t need.

[Gary King]

4 hours ago, vitor said:

How are you passing the URL? The Open URL object has checkboxes regarding what it encodes; untick what you don’t need.

 

I've attached a screenshot below. The checkboxes shouldn't matter since I'm using neither placeholder. In any case, I tested by unchecking them, and nothing changed.

[vitor]

Please provide a short example workflow so I can better understand your issue and how to solve it.

[Gary King]

30 minutes ago, vitor said:

Please provide a short example workflow so I can better understand your issue and how to solve it.

I've attached the test workflow (in the next post)

 

Here are the issues:

 

• %0A (for a newline) gets added to the end of the URL, when I thought Alfred should trim URLs before opening them.
• it seems impossible to pass an ampersand as a query string, since Alfred replaces the %26 with %2526

 

As you can see, in the script, I open the URL 

https://example.com/?query=a%26b

But Alfred opens 

https://example.com/?query=a%2526b%0A

instead.

Edited May 15, 2024 by Gary King

[Gary King]

Sorry, I didn't realize that I can't attach workflows to posts.

 

I've linked to the workflow here.

[vitor]

It is the newline which is causing the issue. You can verify this by using a Transform Utility to trim whitespace before passing it to the Open URL, or by appending | tr -d '\n' (which deletes newlines) to the command in the Run Script. You should be able to do the same by having the script not output a newline at the end. With that, the encoding works as expected.

 

I’ll think about it a bit and discuss internally but I’m betting this may be intentional (the Open URL object has existed for a long time). When faced with an entity which has to be encoded (the newline) but isn’t, it makes sense to assume the URL isn’t encoded.

[Gary King]

Thanks, I learned a lot. I've been writing Alfred workflows for a long time, but now I've realized that I've always used Script Filter and output JSON, with arg set to a URL, so Alfred would always read it perfectly.