Make URL-encoding smarter or optional

[deanishe]

Ref: http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/5993-custom-searches-with-full-url-as-the-query/

Unless {query} is the entire URL, the Open URL action behaves as if {query} is a query string value and URL-encodes it, i.e. it assumes:

http://www.example.com/page?arg={query}

This is not always the case, however. {query} may also be a part of the URL path, e.g.

http://www.example.com/{query}/some/other/thing

In the latter case, most browsers will choke on the URL (I think only Firefox is smart enough to handle URL-encoded paths).

Alfred should ideally provide a checkbox to turn URL-encoding of {query} off to avoid messing up {query}.

Alternatively, it could try to determine whether {query} is actually the value of a GET parameter (for example, based on the presence of "arg=…"), but the on/off option is probably more robust.

Edited July 6, 2015 by deanishe

[Andrew]

I agree, there are definitely improvements which can be made in this area, but I may leave this until a more major release (as there is the Workflows workaround at this point).

 

Other improvements would be the option to encode spaces as other characters such as - and _ which would give even more flexibility.

 

I've added a ticket

[alocknkey]

I see in Alfred 5 we changed some of the encoding setup. I have a custom search that takes the query value and puts it into an Atlassian JQL search.  Unfortunately Atlassian reserves the space character and now with the forced encoding I cannot find a way to keep it an actual space.  More info on Atlassian JQL can be found  https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwareserver0820/search-syntax-for-text-fields-1095249262.html.

Essentially my resulting URL I want to send to the browser should look like this `https://URL/issues/?jql=text~"alfred app"` and my custom query looks like this `https://URL/issues/?jql=text~"{query}"` .

Is there an option to not modify the query?  This used to work in Alfred 4, I believe.

[vitor]

@alocknkey Try doing it as a workflow instead: connect a Keyword Input to an Open URL Action (which has finer control over the encoding).

Edited September 14, 2022 by vitor

[alocknkey]

@vitor - I don't have access to that post for some reason.  But the workflow works thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately now I cannot have it as a fallback search 😕

 

Edited September 14, 2022 by alocknkey

[alocknkey]

After researching this more I found a better URL to send to our Jira instance.  Thanks for the reply.

[vitor]

1 hour ago, alocknkey said:

Unfortunately now I cannot have it as a fallback search

 

You can, by adding a Fallback Search Trigger to the workflow.

[dannysamk]

@vitor Thanks that helped I ran into the exact same issue I had to create a workflow to disable encoding the {query} parameter option.

 

Previously I was able to get this working with Web search now it encodes the % itself breaking the Jira search.

 

The working config is here for anyone who is looking for a fix.

 

This Web search config as shown below no longer works 💔 

 

 

We need to do this Create a workflow as mentioned here 

 

Then uncheck encoding for {query} placeholder

 

 

 

 

 

Now disable the Web search and only have the Workflow enabled 👍

 

 

 

 

Edited September 20, 2022 by dannysamk