Accepting special characters as input from the URL in C#-CodePudding

Language used: C#
Input: An abbreviation or an emoticon.
Output: Translation of the abbreviation or emoticon

Code:

public class EmoticonController : ApiController { // GET: api/emoticon/abbreviation/shortform [HttpGet] [Route("api/emoticon/abbreviation/{shortform}")]

 public string Abbreviation(string ShortForm)
{
     string outputMessage;

     // Switch case that assigns the outputMessage the translation to the abbreviation entered by the user 
     switch (ShortForm)
     {

         case "TY":
             outputMessage = "Thank you";
             break;

         case "(~.~)":
             outputMessage = "sleepy";
             break;

         default:
             outputMessage = "Invalid Input";
             break;
     }

     return outputMessage;
 }

}

I run the above code in Visual studio and enter the URL as

localhost/api/emoticon/abbreviation/(~.~)

and I get the following error: C# URL Special characters error

CodePudding user response：

Since you have the action header "...abbreviation/{shortform}" you need a MVC style Url with route valulues. This Url is very sensitive to a special characters. You can try to encode/decode the special characters, but it is not always succesfull and sometimes it is not possible. It is much easier to use a query string as a part of URL. You can achieve it by changing your action header to this

[Route("~/api/emoticon/abbreviation")]
 public string Abbreviation(string ShortForm)

and after this you can use this url

localhost/api/emoticon/abbreviation?shortForm=(~.~)