title: How to urlencode the asterisk
body: <p>I'm trying to find what the urlencoded value of an asterisk would be. This is not for a URL, though, so please bear with me while I explain.</p>
  
  <p><strong>The background</strong>: I'm working with a really old copy of Velocity (in Clickability), and I'm trying to build a search string to pass to solr, where <strong>*</strong> is a reserved character.</p>
  
  <p>My problem is (and I'm not sure if this is a Clickability thing or velocity specific) when I use the replacement function with <strong>"\*"</strong> as the 'replace the * with this' parameter, it freaks out, and I have to use single quotes around the string (so I end up with <strong>'\*'</strong>). I wouldn't have thought twice about this being an issue, but none of the replacements that use single quotes around them actually get triggered.</p>
  
  <p>So my solution until vendor support gets back to me is to urlencode everything, including special characters, and do replacements on the encoded strings. So instead of <strong>:</strong> getting replaced with <strong>\:</strong>, I'm replacing <strong>%3A</strong> with <strong>%5C%3A</strong>. Then when I'm done with all that, I'm decoding it and passing it to Solr.</p>
  
  <p>However I can't find what the % symbols are for the <strong>*</strong>. Can someone help me out or point me in the right direction?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!
  --Lisa</p>