Acceptable characters in string parm.

[Jim Reed]

Are there reserved characters other than '&' that cannot be passed in a parameter srting in a hyperlink? A '#' was included as part of a test address line, which caused the program to return "MCH3601 - pointer not set". Am I correct that the 'p' and 'l' in the parm value and length controls have to be lower case?

[David]

Yes, the 'p' and 'l' parameter names must be specified in lowercase.

There are a number of characters which are reserved in URLs and must be encoded if they occur inside a parameter value.

Many languages have built-in functions for this. For example, if the links are created with JavaScript, you can use the encodeURIComponent() function to encode the data parts.

If the links are created with RPG, a good way to do it is to create an ILE sub-procedure to perform the encoding of those data parts for you.

See here for the set of reserved characters and their encodings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding