%frozen widgets%

does the % mean anything significant?

[chewy]

Hi,

Subject and description says most of it...

I'm seeing some of my regular key words and phrases demarcated by %% in my logfiles and I can't suss out any pattern as to if there is anything about this that is useful..

Are these from a type of browser, type of engine, or completely useless?

Yes, unfortunately, I was unable to use site search here to learn about it...

Thanks,

C.

[claus]

- could you post an excerpt from the log file, replacing the keyword with "widgets" and replacing your site name with "example.com" (if needed)?

It's a bit hard to get an idea about what it is without seeing an example. Normally, a keyword would not be recorded in a log file unless it was part of an URL (on site or in querystring) or part of an User-Agent or referrer string.

/claus

[chewy]

These are showing up in webtrends live as terms.

yes, also in logs as:

httx://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22frozen+widget%22&ei=UTF-8&fr=f

httx://ms101.mysearch.com/jsp/GGmain.jsp?searchfor=%27blue+widgets%2

sometimes with the "22%"

httx://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22sample+blue%22+widgets

etc.

C.

[claus]

Ah, i get it. it's an URL escape character - it means that someone has searched for your term and put quotes around the words.

>> %22sample+blue%22+widgets

- means: "sample blue" widgets

Try entering the queries you posted in the address bar of your browser and watch the search box on the page, then you'll see it.

/claus

[chewy]

Cool, I guess that's a boolean type search.

Thanks!

C.

[killroy]

Nothing to do with a boolean search.

URLs only can include certain characters as valid, all others need to be escapbed (%+ character code). quotes and some other stuff falls into this category and will show up as escaped sequences in your log. Decode the urls before you start analysis.

SN

[Mohamed_E]

Where can I find a table of these codes?

Thanks.

[Yidaki]

>Where can I find a table of these codes?

HTML Entities [google.com]

[Mohamed_E]

I do not think that these are "entities". From what I understand entities are HTML-type things, and we have " for the quote rather than %22.

Looking around with Google (not to easy, the word "escape" occurs is so many contexes) I was led to How do I decode or create those %-encodings on the web? [perldoc.com], where I learned that these % escapes are just the hex value of the ASCII symbol, a table is found at AsciiTable.com [asciitable.com].

[claus]

These two JavaScript functions might be interesting:

- escape()
- unescape()

I even found a translator using them. Link: [earthonly.com...]

/claus

[chewy]

Killroy,

Please, what do you mean "decode the urls before you start analysis"?

Is there a faq somewhere on this so I can read up before I ask anymore dumb questions?

C.

[claus]

I think killroy ment something along the lines of "use a translator (like the one i posted a link to above) on your logfile urls, then you will be able to analyze them without those weird characters"

/claus