Firefox automatically decoding encoded parameter in url, does not happen in IE
I am having frustration between Firefox and IE, well mostly Firefox as it is automatically decoding a parameter in the hash before I can work with it in Javascript. IE does not automatically decode the url thus not giving me reading errors.
My problem is similar to this one except I am not using ASP.NET ASP.NET MVC automatically decoding JSON-encoded parameters from AJAX
So if I take a url like example.com/#question=!%40%23%24%25^%26*(
whereas the "!%40%23%24%25^%26*(" was encoded using encodeURIComponent, in IE when I access the hash it will be left as "!%40%23%24%25^%26*(", however in firefox, when I access the hash it is automatically decoded into "!@#$%^&*("
The problem with this is that in my script I am using decodeURIComponent to decode the encoded value, which is fine if the string is indeed encoded. Since it is already decoded in Firefox, it gives me a malformed URI sequence error, and IE does not give me any errors at all.
How can I fix this?
Answer
After searching I found out that this is a cross browser problem, and it is better to use location.href.split("#")[1] instead of window.location.hash