Encoding of window.location.hash

Does window.location.hash contain the encoded or decoded representation of the url part?

When I open the same url (http://localhost/something/#%C3%BC where %C3%BCtranslates to ü) in Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8, I get diff开发者_开发知识库erent values for document.location.hash:

• IE8: #%C3%BC
• FF3.5: #ü

Is there a way to get one variant in both browsers?

Unfortunately, this is a bug in Firefox as it decodes location.hash an extra time when it is accessed. For example, try this in Firefox:

location.hash = "#%30";
location.hash === "#0"; // This is wrong, it should be "#%30"

The only cross-browser solution is to just use (location.href.split("#")[1] || "") instead for getting the hash. Setting the hash using location.hash seems to work correctly for all browsers that support location.hash though.

Answering to my own question, my current solution is to parse window.location.href instead of using window.location.hash, because the former is always (i.e. in every browser) url-encoded. Therefore the decodeURIComponent function CMS proposed can always be used safely. YUI does the same, therefore it can't be that wrong...

You can use decodeURIComponent, it will return #ü in all cases:

decodeURIComponent('#%C3%BC'); // #ü
decodeURIComponent('#ü'); // #ü

Try it out here.

Actually in my version of Firefox (3.5 on Linux), if I type "#%C3%BC" as a hash in the URL, the URL itself actually transforms to unicode with "#ü". But you have appeared to answered your own question -- in Firefox, the browser transforms entity escape codes in the URL, while in IE, it does not.

My advice is actually this: Instead of putting "#%C3%BC" in the URL at all, just use full unicode in your hashes and URLs. Is that an option? It should work fine in any modern browser.