Decode URI [http/decode_uri]

When interacting with web servers, some characters have special meaning and can’t be passed directly in a URL. To overcome this limitation, strings can be “URL encoded” to allow special characters to be preserved. In this example, we will use the decodeURIComponent() njs method to decode a URL encoded string provided in the query string parameter foo.

Step 1: Use the following commands to start your NGINX container with this lab’s files:

EXAMPLE='http/decode_uri'
docker run --rm --name njs_example  -v $(pwd)/conf/$EXAMPLE.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro -v $(pwd)/njs/:/etc/nginx/njs/:ro -p 80:80 -d nginx

Step 2: Now let’s use curl to test our NGINX server:

curl -G http://localhost/foo --data-urlencode "foo=Hello Günter"
Hello%20G%C3%BCnter

curl -G http://localhost/dec_foo -d "foo=Hello%20G%C3%BCnter"
Hello Günter

curl -G http://localhost/foo --data-urlencode "foo=привет"
%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82

curl -G http://localhost/dec_foo -d "foo=%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82"
привет

docker stop njs_example

Code Snippets

The NGINX configuraton provides two locations, /foo and /dec_foo. Using /foo just returns the string as is without decoding. The /dec_foo location returns the decoded version of the string.

nginx.conf

  ...

  http {
    js_path "/etc/nginx/njs/";

    js_import utils.js;
    js_import main from http/decode_uri.js;

    js_set $dec_foo main.dec_foo;

    server {
 ...

       location /foo {
           return 200 $arg_foo;
       }

       location /dec_foo {
           return 200 $dec_foo;
       }
     }
 }

In our JavaScript we access the foo argument from the query string through the request’s arguements object (args). We then use the decodeURIComponent() built-in method to decode the string.

decode_uri.js

 function dec_foo(r) {
   return decodeURIComponent(r.args.foo);
 }