Several years ago, I discovered a bug in Bubble’s :formatted as URL operator when the “Replace spaces by +” option is enabled (which it is by default). At the time, I didn’t report it because the workaround is trivial.
After seeing this post and this post, I was motivated to double check and discovered that the issue persists in Bubble to this day. So, I finally reported the bug, and I’m providing the details here for the benefit of others until the issue is fully resolved by the Bubble team.
Problem
The “Replace spaces by +” option of the :formatted as URL operator does NOT work properly.
With that setting enabled…
- FIRST, all spaces in the string are replaced by
+characters. - THEN the string is percent-encoded, which means all the previously added
+characters are encoded as%2B.
The net result is that the encoded string will never actually contain any + characters to represent spaces. (see below screenshot from my bug report)
Solution / Workaround
-
The first thing to try is simply disabling the “Replace spaces by +” setting.
This will encode spaces as
%20, which will work in many (probably most) contexts and with most servers (but will result in a larger and less readable encoded string). -
If you do need (or want) spaces encoded as
+characters, then make sure “Replace spaces by +” is disabled (as above), and just append a:find & replaceoperator to the expression, replacing all occurrences of%20with+as shown in the screenshot below.
