slashes in url variables

I have set up my coldfusion application to have dynamic urls on the page, such as

www.musicExplained/index.cfm/artist/:VariableName

However my variable names will sometimes contain slashes, such as

www.musicExplained/index.cfm/artist/GZA/Genius

This is causing a problem, because my application presumes that the slash in the variable name represents a different section of the website, the artists albums. So the URL will fail.

I am wondering if there is anyway to prevent this from happening? Do I need to use a function that replaces slashes in the variable names with another character?

You need to escape the slashes as %2F.

You could easily replace the forward slashes / with something like an underscore _ such as Wikipedia uses for spaces. Replacing special characters with underscores, etc., is common practice.

You need to escape those but don't just replace it by %2F manually. You can use URLEncoder for this.

Eg URLEncoder.encode(url, "UTF-8")

Then you can say

yourUrl = "www.musicExplained/index.cfm/artist/" + URLEncoder.encode(VariableName, "UTF-8")