TITLE: Plus (+) sign breaks on some sites

PROBLEM:

I love Sogudi. But the conversion of spaces to "+" signs in search queries doesn't work on some sites. For example, if I search for "joel on software" from the Amazon shortcut, I get "joel+on+software" as the Amazon query. I assume that the destination site is responsible for whether the "+" signs are properly converted back to spaces, but some sites don't do this, reducing Sogudi's effectiveness.

Would there be any issues in simply converting spaces to "%20" instead of "+"?

RESPONSE:

Substituting "+" signs for spaces is the defacto internet standard (I forget the RFC document number). The destination site is supposed to decode the URL string before performing the search. This is a bug in Amazon's code. They are not decoding the URL correctly anymore. It used to work just fine. Changing Sogudi to use %20 instead of "+" is not only against the RFC standard, it will also break searches on the majority of sites that have their search function designed correctly (very few actually know what to do with a %20).

SOLUTION:

• You could petition Amazon to fix their code. Good luck with that.

• In a future version of Sogudi, I may consider adding an option with each shortcut to set what characters are used to substitute for spaces.

• In the interim, you could redefine your amazon shortcut to the following (will handle up to four words):
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=blended&...

STATUS: OPEN