enhancement: encode urls before parsing

[JosiahParry]

When using httr2::url_parse() with a url that does not have spaces encoded we get an error from curl.

It would be a nice quality of life enhancement to use URLencode() prior to parsing the url.

The below is an example of the URL that one would get from ArcGIS Online this occurs when this item has spaces in the name—these are not URL encoded (I will be making an internal bug report!)—and using httr2::url_parse() with these urls fails.

url <- "https://services1.arcgis.com/hLJbHVT9ZrDIzK0I/arcgis/rest/services/California Cities Open Platform/FeatureServer/0"
httr2::url_parse(url)
#> Error in curl::curl_parse_url(url, baseurl = base_url, decode = FALSE): Failed to parse URL: Malformed input to a URL function
httr2::url_parse(URLencode(url))
#> <httr2_url>
#> https://services1.arcgis.com/hLJbHVT9ZrDIzK0I/arcgis/rest/services/California%20Cities%20Open%20Platform/FeatureServer/0
#> • scheme: https
#> • hostname: services1.arcgis.com
#> • path:
#> /hLJbHVT9ZrDIzK0I/arcgis/rest/services/California%20Cities%20Open%20Platform/FeatureServer/0

^{Created on 2025-07-24 with reprex v2.1.1}

ref:

httr2/R/url.R

Line 27 in 924415c

curl <- curl::curl_parse_url(url, baseurl = base_url)

[jeroen]

That's not how it works :) A valid URL string cannot contain spaces or certain characters. So the string you are trying to parse here is simply not a valid URL, and the parser correctly errors.

We cannot go guessing what was actually intended with the invalid URL string. Base R URLencode() is very hacky and may happen to fix it for your example but it will actually break other (valid) urls. So if that works for you, you'll have to do that on your end.