The URL-DECODE directive decodes a string from the application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME format to a string.
Syntax
url-decode :column
The column contains an encoded URL to be decoded.
Usage Notes
The conversion process is the reverse of that used by the URL-ENCODE directive. It is assumed that all characters in the encoded string are one of the following: a through z, A through Z, 0 through 9, and -, _, ., and *. The character % is allowed but is interpreted as the start of a special escaped sequence.
See https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4.1 for details.
These rules are applied in the conversion:
The alphanumeric characters
athroughz,AthroughZ, and0through9remain unchangedThe special characters
.,-,*, and_remain unchangedThe plus sign (
+) is converted into a space characterA sequence of the form
%xywill be treated as representing a byte wherexyis the two-digit hexadecimal representation of the 8-bit byte. Then, all substrings that contain one or more of these byte sequences consecutively will be replaced by the character(s) whose encoding would result in those consecutive bytes. The encoding scheme used to decode these characters may be specified, or if unspecified, the default encoding of the platform will be used.
Note: Uses UTF-8 as the decoding scheme for the string.