/* page encodes  a string using URL Encoding. 
URL Encoding is used when placing text in a query string to avoid it being confused with the URL itself. 
It is normally used when the browser sends form data to a web server. 

URL Encoding replaces spaces with "+" signs, and unsafe ASCII characters with "%" followed by their hex equivalent. 
Safe characters are defined in RFC2396. They are the 7-bit ASCII alphanumerics and the mark characters "-_.!~*'()". 
Note that the standard JavaScript escape and unescape functions operate slightly differently: they encode space as "%20", and treat "+" as a safe character. 

*/

function URLEncode(text)
{
	// The Javascript escape and unescape functions do not correspond
	// with what browsers actually do...
	var SAFECHARS = "0123456789" +					// Numeric
					"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" +	// Alphabetic
					"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" +
					"-_.!~*'()";					// RFC2396 Mark characters
	var HEX = "0123456789ABCDEF";

	var plaintext = text;
	var encoded = "";
	for (var i = 0; i < plaintext.length; i++ ) {
		var ch = plaintext.charAt(i);
	    if (ch == " ") {
		    encoded += "+";				// x-www-urlencoded, rather than %20
		} else if (SAFECHARS.indexOf(ch) != -1) {
		    encoded += ch;
		} else {
		    var charCode = ch.charCodeAt(0);
			if (charCode > 255) {
			    alert( "Unicode Character '" 
                        + ch 
                        + "' cannot be encoded using standard URL encoding.\n" +
				          "(URL encoding only supports 8-bit characters.)\n" +
						  "A space (+) will be substituted." );
				encoded += "+";
			} else {
				encoded += "%";
				encoded += HEX.charAt((charCode >> 4) & 0xF);
				encoded += HEX.charAt(charCode & 0xF);
			}
		}
	} // for

	return encoded;
};