$location.hashSearch breaks Firefox

[groner]

Firefox decodes the hash part of a URL and breaks if %XX encoding of high-bit bytes aren't UTF-8.

Examples:
Firefox works: http://server/app#?filter=PIHLSTR%C3%96M
Firefox breaks: http://server/app#?filter=PIHLSTR%D6M

Updating location.hash/href or calling location.assign()/replace() is the same. There's no exception, navigation just doesn't happen.

I've found this in Firefox 3.6 and 5.0. There are a few bugs discussing it, but it doesn't seem like a fix is imminent.

[groner]

It appears that this could be fixed by changing toKeyValue() and parseKeyValue() use encodeURIQuery() instead of escape(). Is there a reason that these routines are using escape()?

[vojtajina]

Thanks groner, it looks like your proposal is sensible to do...

[IgorMinar]

right. escape should not be used here. can't we safely switch to using encodeUriSegment?

[vojtajina]

From $location point of view - path and hash are encoded using our custom encodeUriSegment function.
As $location is currently the only place where toKeyValue is used, we should probably use encodeUriQuery...

[IgorMinar]

https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/src/service/location.js#L242 uses escape. isn't that the issue?

[vojtajina]

You are right Igor, but new $location uses our custom encodeUriSegment for hash and path, but toKeyValue for search, which uses escape... So we need to change toKeyValue to use our custom encodeUriQuery...