I found a handy unicode converter online. This might become handy when for encoding UTF-8 characters in Javascript/JSON objects. (such as for example the € sign. which becomes: “\u20ac”

http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/uniview/conversion.php

In Joomla 1.5, you need to press the logout button within the login component, to log off your session.
This logic doesn’t seem very clear for me. If I want to log-off I don’t want 2 page clicks/refreshes.

To create a logout button or menu link, you just need to invoke the logout URL part:

index.php?option=com_user&task=logout&return=Lw==

Or incase when you have Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL’s:

/logout.html?return=Lw

Now did you note, the return=Lw== parameter?
This parameter is for bringing you back to the return page, after logging out.
The “Lw==”-value, is a Base64 encoding for “/” which brings you back to the root of the page.

Say that you don’t want to forward to the root, but to the ‘/goodbye/index.html’ page?
You will need the Base64 encoding of this string:

/logout.html?return=L2dvb2RieWUvaW5kZXguaHRtbA==

Well, here’s your help, I found a nice online Base64 converter, which does this job for you.

Check out my website to see it working in a Joomla 1.5 page.

Today I found this usefull link to encode Unicode to Decimal.
Unicode – Decimal Encoder

This tool encodes special characters (or for example chinese characters) to a decimal entity encoding:
For example © will be encode to: ©

On my job I often get a lot of questions about forming URL’s with parameters. The key is URL Encoding.
For example when you have a page which contains 2 parameters:

http://www.mypage.com/myscript.jsp?parameter1=x&parameter2=y

The parameters are seperated from the url by the question mark. “?”
The page myscript.jsp contains 2 parameters seperated each other by the “&” sign.

Now let’s say you have a forward script, a script which forwards your page to an other page.

http://www.mysite.com/forward.jsp?url=http://www.mypage.com/myscript.jsp

When you want to keep the parameters of the myscript.jsp page, you need to URL encode this.

http://www.mysite.com/forward.jsp?url=http://www.mypage.com/myscript.jsp%3Fparameter1=x%26parameter2=y

What would happen if you would not use URL encoding:
(http://www.mysite.com/forward.jsp?url=http://www.mypagecom/myscript.jsp?parameter1=x&parameter2=y)
Instead of reading the url like this:

	[1: http://www.mysite.com/forward.jsp?url= [2: http://www.mypage.com/myscript.jsp?[2A: parameter1=x]&[2B:parameter2=y]]

It breaks the URL after parameter1 because of the “&” sign, which seperates “parameter2″ from the parameter “url”:

	[1: http://www.mysite.com/forward.jsp?url= [2: http://www.mypage.com/myscript.jsp?][3: parameter1=x]&[4: parameter2=y]

Now say that you are using a monitoring tracker script. Which should track the forward script aswell.
You can simply not use an URL encoded string within an URL encoding:

http://www.thirdparty.com/tracker.jsp?url=http://www.mysite.com/forward.jsp?url=http://www.mypage.com/myscript.jsp%3Fparameter1=x%26parameter2=y

From here you are using again double questionmarks which is not right.
And the moment when the browser decodes the url, the url will be broken again on the “&” sign.

[1: http://www.thirdparty.com/tracker.jsp?url= [2: http://www.mysite.com/forward.jsp?url= [3: http://www.mypage.com/myscript.jsp?][4: parameter1=x]&[5: parameter2=y]]

Means there is no other way, to solve this in the URL. To track the forward url with url parameter, there should be a script behind, which is retrieving and tracking and forwarding the URLS.

Use this Tool to encode URLS:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/Utils/endecode.html