Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

URLencode Widget Information

Introduction
This widget will take any text on your clipboard and URLencode or URLdecode it.

Warning!
The MacOSX clipboard is capable of copying rtf formatted text. (Notice when you copy from a webpage and then paste it into TextEdit, it usually still has the fonts, formatting, and colors). The URLencode widget attempts to translate that text to plain text before encoding it!

Usage
To use the URLencode, simply copy some text onto your clipboard (Command - c), then open your Dashboard (F12 is the default button), and then click either the ENCODE or DECODE buttons on the URLencode Widget. The resulting text will be on your clipboard, ready to be pasted (Command - v) into a different place.

Why would you want to do this, you ask? Well, many people who work as programmers, database admins, XML users, and the like, tend to need to have text encoded by hand on occasion. Encoding the text changes all special characters including spaces into a 3 character string starting with % and ending with the two digit ASCII code for the character.

This is important when placing text into a URL string (can't have spaces in a website address, for instance), or when placing text inside of the attribute of an XML tag (where a " character would result in illegal XML). I needed this functionality for myself, and chose to make a Dashboard Widget to do the work for me.

An example of encoding text would be as follows:

Hey! Would you like some Ice Cream???

Would be encoded to:

Hey%21%20Would%20you%20like%20some%20Ice%20Cream%3F%3F%3F%00

How it works
For you geeks who want to know how it works, this is simply using Applescript's ability to change the class of the text to "ktxt". Then it runs the javascript encode() or decode() functions on the resulting text and places the result onto the clipboard again.

Known issues and bugs

some rtf (rich text) formatting seems to break in the Applescript conversion to plain text, leaving you with incomplete results. If possible, it is best to have plain text on your clipboard before encoding or decoding.

Disclaimer
Use this software at your own risk. I am not responsible for anything that might go wrong when using the URLencode Widget.

Contact
I wrote this simply for my own use, and don't plan on actively supporting it. But if you have questions or comments, feel free to contact me via email

Enjoy!