URL encoding in Qlik Sense and QlikView

With so much cool data available online, tools like QlikView and Sense becomes real Swiss Army knives of data integration.

Pull in some data from company internal databases, some data from previously created QVDs, and more and more commonly also from various online sources, both public and private. Depending on how you call those online APIs you might get away with just sending in query parameters as they are, but in other cases – and this is especially true if you need to send more complex text strings to the API – you need to URL encode the query parameters.

Over the years I have run into this numerous times, but the other weekend I realised it’s actually very easy. Just create a mapping table using an online source for the utf8-to-URL encoded mapping, then use MapSubstring to convert each character in the URL parameter to its hex counterpart.

Code for this found over at GitHub, it’s just 10 or so lines of code.

Occam’s razor holds true again – the easy solutions prevail and are usually preferred!