URL Access Scripting & accented characters

Question

I'm trying to write a small iTunes script that checks whether track titles of an album match those in the MusicBrainz database. But I'm running into a small problem when I try to retrieve the album information when it's title has accented characters.
Here's a snippet of code:
property baseURL : "http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/release/"
property tempFile : "Data:temp:tempAlbumInfo.xml"
property albumTitle : "með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust"
set queryURL to "?type=xml&releasetypes=Official&limit=10&title=" & albumTitle
set the clipboard to (baseURL & queryURL)
-- Fetch the releases info from musicbrainz
tell application "URL Access Scripting"
download (baseURL & queryURL) to tempFile replacing yes
end tell
This gives me a 503 error from URL Access Scripting, but when I paste the variable just copied to the clipboard into Firefox, the page loads perfectly. Pasting it into Safari, it doesn't work.
I'm guessing it has something to do with either the way URL Access Scripting and Safari rawurlencode their URLs, or some Unicode / Latin-1 problems.
Oh, and for album titles without accented characters it all works perfectly. Any idea why this is happening? Thanks!

Answer 1

Hello
I think you need to escape URI string properly.
Try replacing the line:
set queryURL to "?type=xml&releasetypes=Official&limit=10&title=" & albumTitle
with these two lines:
set escapedTitle to do shell script "echo " & quoted form of albumTitle & " | perl -Mutf8 -MURI::Escape -lne 'print uri_escape($_);'"
set queryURL to "?type=xml&releasetypes=Official&limit=10&title=" & escapedTitle
Hope this may help,
H
Message was edited by: Hiroto (fixed typo: URI::Escape is the correct module.)