UNESCAPE Function

This function unescapes the escape character sequences to its original form in a URL, to convert the %XX escape character sequences to the original characters.

Syntax

FUNCTION unescape(
   url            IN VARCHAR2,
   url_charset IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT utl_http.body_charset)
                  RETURN VARCHAR2;

Parameters

Table 84-3 shows the parameters for the UNESCAPE function.

Table 84-4 UNESCAPE Function Parameters

Parameter	Description
url (IN)	The URL to unescape
url_charset (IN)	After a character is unescaped, the character is assumed to be in the source_charset character set and it will be converted from the source_charset to the database character set before the URL is returned. If source_charset is NULL, the database charset is assumed and no character set conversion occurred. The default value is the current default body character set of the UTL_HTTP package, whose default value is "ISO-8859-1". The character set can be named in Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) or Oracle naming convention.

Usage Notes

The Web server that you receive the URL from may use a character set that is different from that of your database. In that case, specify the url_charset as the Web server character set so that the characters that need to be unescaped are unescaped in the source character set. For example, a user of an EBCDIC database who receives a URL from an ASCII Web server should unescape the URL using US7ASCII so that %20 is unescaped as a space (0x20 is the hex code of a space in ASCII) instead of a ? (because 0x20 is not a valid character in EBCDIC).

This function does not validate a URL for the proper URL format.