how to prevent drupal_goto from encoding plus and comma characters?

I'm working with this same issue and this patch does not appear to be in D7 beta2, so I guess that it is unlikely to make it into D7. The code appears to be quite different... anyone any ideas on how to work this patch into D7?

Using an autopath pattern, the '+' does appear in the url ( when running cursor over link or viewing the link) - but when the url is clicked - at some point the '+' is encoded and appears as '%2B' in the url as displayed as the address bar of the browser. My understanding is that '+' is a "reserved" character, however... it is legal within an url path and therefore should not be encoded in that position.

OK, Ive done some research and delved into the D7 code to see how this can be done and I have come up with a hack that works.

Step 1: modify drupal_http_build_query in common.inc. This removes the encoding for the + character in the url.

<?php
function drupal_http_build_query(array $query, $parent = '') {
  $params = array();

  foreach ($query as $key => $value) {
    $key = ($parent ? $parent . '[' . rawurlencode($key) . ']' : rawurlencode($key));

    // Recurse into children.
    if (is_array($value)) {
      $params[] = drupal_http_build_query($value, $key);
    }
    // If a query parameter value is NULL, only append its key.
    elseif (!isset($value)) {
      $params[] = $key;
    }
    else {
      // For better readability of paths in query strings, we decode slashes.
      //$params[] = $key . '=' . str_replace('%2F','/', rawurlencode($value)); // ORIGINAL
      $params[] = $key . '=' . str_replace(array('%2F','%2B'),array('/','+'), rawurlencode($value)); // MODIFIED
	  
    }
  }
  	
  return implode('&', $params);
}
?>

This however exposes one of the difficulties! This fix will probably work without further work if clean urls are enabled ( I can't test because I'm developing on a windows machine ). But without clean urls the path becomes part of the query string. The plus character is a 'reserved' character in query strings representing a space. PHP automatically converts the + to a space and drupal is therefore unable to route the page. My understanding is that a space is not a valid character within a path. The next part of the solution relies on this.

Step 2: Modify drupal_lookup_path in path.inc

<?php
function drupal_lookup_path($action, $path = '', $path_language = NULL) {
  $path=str_replace(' ','+', $path); //ADD THIS
  ...
?>

I simply replace any spaces with + in the path.

This is a very specific fix but I hope this helps someone to a final more general patch!

As of D7-RC2 with clean urls the following is also required for the above solution (common.inc line 610 )

function drupal_encode_path($path) {
  return str_replace(array('%2F','%2B'),array('/','+'), rawurlencode($path));
}