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Status Future consideration
Workspace IBM i
Categories Db2 for i
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 18, 2025

RELATED IDEAS

Make SQL function URL_ENCODE support RFC3986

RFC3986 dictates that any space in a URL must be converted to "%20". However, when we run "values URL_ENCODE(' Hello there!'), we get "Hello+there%21" with the plus sign instead of "%20". The same is output from URLENCODE in SYSTOOLS.

It seems like the functions encode according to the older form data encoding originating from the HTML 2.0 specs, described in RFC1738, now updated by RFC3986.

Every programming language has this issue (I checked JavaScript, PHP and Python), and they all have two functions for URL encoding. I suppose SQL could do the same and have a URL_ENCODE_RFC3986 function to do it correctly - which seems like a very long name to type, just to get the RFC encoding. IMHO it would be better to have URL_ENCODE follow the RFC3986 standard.

To be compatible and not break anything, a parameter could be added to the URL_ENCODE function, e.g. "RFC3986 => true" with a default of "false" to keep the old behavior. Another option could be to have a global variable "URL_ENCODE_RFC3986" controlling the encoding if the parameter is not specified, thus allowing the customer to change the system default for any URL_ENCODE calls without the parameter.

Idea priority Medium
  • Guest
    Nov 18, 2025

    I ran into this exact issue today.   Rather than just calling URL_ENCODE, I had to write code to break the string at blanks, and piece together a URL_ENCODE of each piece and then insert %20 between each piece.  Upvoting this item. 

    Reply
  • Guest
    Nov 18, 2025
    IBM will use this Idea as input to planning, but no commitment is made or implied. This Idea will be updated in the future if IBM implements it.

    Db2 for i Development team
    IBM Power Systems Development
    Reply

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