URL encoding in bash with perl

ENCODED=$(echo -n "value to encode" | \
perl -pe's/([^-_.~A-Za-z0-9])/sprintf("%%%02X", ord($1))/seg');
echo $ENCODED

This command line percent-encodes strings, even binary data. You can use redirection. I used `echo -n` because I didn’t want a newline (%0A) tagged onto the end. I’ll be using this in a bash script to send HTTP POST data via curl.

My result is based on Perl URL Encode & Decode String, modified to be run on the command line and updated to skip the four non-alphanumeric unreserved characters specified in RFC 3986 Section 2.3.

I don’t know if this depends on Perl multibyte settings or anything else. I might have just been lucky. Perl isn’t my thing.

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Tags: bash, perl