Escaping special characters in <UniformResourceIdentifier>

[ivh]

The escape() method replaces obviously bad characters such as '<' with '%3E' etc, but does not escape the '%' character itself for some reason. This means that clauses such as
MoleculeInchikey LIKE "XLYOFNOQVPJJNP%"
get escaped to
MoleculeInchikey%20LIKE%20%22XLYOFNOQVPJJNP%%22
which doesn't validate ("... not a valid value for 'anyURI'").
Do we need to escape the % character manually?

(submitted by C.Hill)

[guyrixon]

Where in the node software does this escaping happen? Is it in the query validation, or when writing the capabilities?

[ivh]

In the self-describing Source if I understand it correctly, the validation of the URL-element.

[ivh]

I just thought a few minutes about this and it seems a little tricky: We cannot just escape all %-signs since many clients (like wget) already transform things like "AtomSymbol like 'U%'" into AtomSymbol%20like%20'U%25' so escaping the % in %XX once more will be bad.

In principle, I guess, the clients should encode these things before sending and it will validate in this case. Any suggestions on how to catch the cases where the % is an unescaped percent-sign? A regexp on LIKE comes to mind but there might be a better way.