Passing a query string to a request as an actual string using Node and Express

Question

So, basically what I am doing is scraping a webpage, getting all of the data I want and displaying it on a webpage on my site. When scraping this specific page i need the link within the 'href' tag. However, this particular site doesn't use regular links. Inside the 'href' tag is a query string. My plan was to take what was inside the 'href' and create a url to make my next request, but now when I try to pass the query string into the url, I can not access it in Node via req.params

I want to know if there is a way to maybe pass a query string without the server thinking it is a query string, or will I have to use req.query to take all the params and build the URL again from scratch?

Here are some examples of what I am talking about:

page1.ejs:

<a href="/display/<%= some.href %>"></a>

some.href = "?variable=bleh"

Server-side handling:

app.get('/display/:string', function(req, res) {
  var url = "http://theurlineed.com/" + req.params.string;
});

This code does not work. When i click on the link it tells me it couldn't get /display/?variable=bleh

NathanW · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-23 23:17:35Z

1

You need to encode the query string so that it is not treated like a query string in the URL:

some.href = encodeURIComponent("?variable=bleh");

So then your URL will be: /display/%3Fvariable%3Dbleh. As mentioned in the comments, Express will automatically decode the value in req.params.string so it will be the right value.

edited Apr 23, 2016 at 23:17

answered Apr 23, 2016 at 23:08

NathanW

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6 Comments

Dalton Over a year ago

I will try this now.

Dalton Over a year ago

Aha! It worked. Thank you very very much! +1 Btw, express did automatically decode it. It turned it into a looong string in the URL bar, but server side when I log the param it was how it needed to be.

NathanW Over a year ago

Awesome! Don't forget to mark my response as the correct answer :)

Dalton Over a year ago

Will do. Gotta wait for this silly wait time to mark a correct answer. Seems pointless.

NathanW Over a year ago

Oh yeah, I forgot SO makes you wait a while to be able to do a bunch of things at the beginning. It is weird that marking an answer as the solution is one of those things...

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