urlParameters preserve @ as unescaped

[daniel-thisnow]

I am trying to use DotMailer merge tags in Front Matter urlParameters. I am out of my depth as usual. I know @ is a reserved character and needs the right combination of '' and "" to preserve. I understand double quotes encodes, whereas single could preserve.

---

urlParameters: utm_source: '@date@'

Url outputs.

utm_source=%40date%40

If anyone knows the answer, that would be great. I've been looking at cheerio and htmlparser2 - generally looking through the dependencies hoping to get lucky with some parameters I can override.

Note- research so far "decodeURIComponent('%40')", , { decodeEntities: true }

[cossssmin]

The query-string library that Maizzle uses for this feature is decoding key/values by default.

I could expose that library's configuration so you could set decode: false.

It would work like this in your config.js:

urlParameters: {
  opts: {
    // pass options directly to query-string
    decode: false,
  },
},

You would then add params in the template as usual, and your urlParameters in the front matter will be merged with what is defined in config.js.

The only problem I see here is coming up with a safe name for that opts object - someone may actually need to have an &opts=... parameter.

[cossssmin]

Meanwhile, you can use replaceStrings and just flat out replace %40 with @:

// config.js

module.exports = {
  // ...
  cleanup: {
    replaceStrings: {
      '%40': '@',
    },
  },
}

[daniel-thisnow]

Thanks Cosmin, very kind of you to help me out.

replaceStrings is good enough for me. Stupidly I tried that last night on my quest, but forgot that I was running maizzle serve instead of production.

I was looking at all kinds of regex's without realising that none of it would have any effect. #bubble.

[cossssmin]

Happy to help! 😊

Note that running maizzle serve (or maizzle build for that matter) uses only the config.js. So, stuff you want to be globally available in the config, no matter if developing locally or for production, can be added to config.js.

I'll look into exposing those query-string options to the config these days, will close the issue once we have a solution in place 👍

[cossssmin]

@daniel-thisnow I made posthtml-url-parameters, which will allow you to pass options to the query-string library. It'll be used once we migrate to PostHTML templating - for now just use replaceStrings.

[cossssmin]

Added in 65c9d45afdb19f490fa311eacd5a1a41bbc504cb, will be available in v1.0.0.