HTML Form Submission optimization guide with Special Characters in URL - Edge Case Handling
I'm working with an scenario with my HTML form submission when users input special characters. Specifically, when a user enters a string with special characters like `&`, `%`, or `#`, the form does not submit properly, leading to unexpected behavior. I've made sure to set the form's `action` attribute correctly, but the server seems to be receiving incorrectly encoded values. Here’s the relevant part of my HTML form: ```html <form action="/submit-form" method="POST" id="myForm"> <input type="text" name="username" placeholder="Enter your name" required /> <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> </form> ``` In my JavaScript, I've also added an event listener to log the form data before submission: ```javascript document.getElementById('myForm').addEventListener('submit', (event) => { event.preventDefault(); const formData = new FormData(event.target); for (const [key, value] of formData.entries()) { console.log(`${key}: ${value}`); } // Here I'm trying to manually handle the submission fetch(event.target.action, { method: 'POST', body: formData, }); }); ``` However, when I test this with an input like `John & Jane`, the console logs the username as `John & Jane`, but the server receives it as `John %26 Jane` which is not what I expect. I’ve tried using `encodeURIComponent()` on the form data, but it doesn’t seem to resolve the scenario properly. Also, I’m using a simple Node.js server with Express, which should be able to handle URL-encoded data. Here's how I'm parsing the data on the server-side: ```javascript app.use(express.urlencoded({ extended: true })); app.post('/submit-form', (req, res) => { console.log(req.body.username); // This logs 'John %26 Jane' res.send('Form submitted!'); }); ``` Is there a best practice for handling special characters in form submissions to ensure that they are correctly encoded and decoded? Any suggestions on how to fix this scenario would be greatly appreciated!