Encode/Decode URLs in C++

Answering my own question...

libcurl has curl_easy_escape for encoding.

For decoding, curl_easy_unescape

string urlDecode(string &SRC) {
    string ret;
    char ch;
    int i, ii;
    for (i=0; i<SRC.length(); i++) {
        if (SRC[i]=='%') {
            sscanf(SRC.substr(i+1,2).c_str(), "%x", &ii);
            ch=static_cast<char>(ii);
            ret+=ch;
            i=i+2;
        } else {
            ret+=SRC[i];
        }
    }
    return (ret);
}

not the best, but working fine ;-)

CGICC includes methods to do url encode and decode. form_urlencode and form_urldecode

This version is pure C and can optionally normalize the resource path. Using it with C++ is trivial:

#include <string>
#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    const std::string src("/some.url/foo/../bar/%2e/");
    std::cout << "src=\"" << src << "\"" << std::endl;

    // either do it the C++ conformant way:
    char* dst_buf = new char[src.size() + 1];
    urldecode(dst_buf, src.c_str(), 1);
    std::string dst1(dst_buf);
    delete[] dst_buf;
    std::cout << "dst1=\"" << dst1 << "\"" << std::endl;

    // or in-place with the &[0] trick to skip the new/delete
    std::string dst2;
    dst2.resize(src.size() + 1);
    dst2.resize(urldecode(&dst2[0], src.c_str(), 1));
    std::cout << "dst2=\"" << dst2 << "\"" << std::endl;
}

Outputs:

src="/some.url/foo/../bar/%2e/"
dst1="/some.url/bar/"
dst2="/some.url/bar/"

And the actual function:

#include <stddef.h>
#include <ctype.h>

/**
 * decode a percent-encoded C string with optional path normalization
 *
 * The buffer pointed to by @dst must be at least strlen(@src) bytes.
 * Decoding stops at the first character from @src that decodes to null.
 * Path normalization will remove redundant slashes and slash+dot sequences,
 * as well as removing path components when slash+dot+dot is found. It will
 * keep the root slash (if one was present) and will stop normalization
 * at the first questionmark found (so query parameters won't be normalized).
 *
 * @param dst       destination buffer
 * @param src       source buffer
 * @param normalize perform path normalization if nonzero
 * @return          number of valid characters in @dst
 * @author          Johan Lindh <johan@linkdata.se>
 * @legalese        BSD licensed (http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause)
 */
ptrdiff_t urldecode(char* dst, const char* src, int normalize)
{
    char* org_dst = dst;
    int slash_dot_dot = 0;
    char ch, a, b;
    do {
        ch = *src++;
        if (ch == '%' && isxdigit(a = src[0]) && isxdigit(b = src[1])) {
            if (a < 'A') a -= '0';
            else if(a < 'a') a -= 'A' - 10;
            else a -= 'a' - 10;
            if (b < 'A') b -= '0';
            else if(b < 'a') b -= 'A' - 10;
            else b -= 'a' - 10;
            ch = 16 * a + b;
            src += 2;
        }
        if (normalize) {
            switch (ch) {
            case '/':
                if (slash_dot_dot < 3) {
                    /* compress consecutive slashes and remove slash-dot */
                    dst -= slash_dot_dot;
                    slash_dot_dot = 1;
                    break;
                }
                /* fall-through */
            case '?':
                /* at start of query, stop normalizing */
                if (ch == '?')
                    normalize = 0;
                /* fall-through */
            case '\0':
                if (slash_dot_dot > 1) {
                    /* remove trailing slash-dot-(dot) */
                    dst -= slash_dot_dot;
                    /* remove parent directory if it was two dots */
                    if (slash_dot_dot == 3)
                        while (dst > org_dst && *--dst != '/')
                            /* empty body */;
                    slash_dot_dot = (ch == '/') ? 1 : 0;
                    /* keep the root slash if any */
                    if (!slash_dot_dot && dst == org_dst && *dst == '/')
                        ++dst;
                }
                break;
            case '.':
                if (slash_dot_dot == 1 || slash_dot_dot == 2) {
                    ++slash_dot_dot;
                    break;
                }
                /* fall-through */
            default:
                slash_dot_dot = 0;
            }
        }
        *dst++ = ch;
    } while(ch);
    return (dst - org_dst) - 1;
}

you can simply use function AtlEscapeUrl() from atlutil.h, just go through its documentation on how to use it.