Itunes Search API $http jsonp get - get rid of url encoding

i'm doing a $http.jsonp call in angular against Apple's iTunes Search API to retrieve data about songs from a specific artist.

A normal get request to the endpoint would be

https://itunes.apple.com/search?callback=angular.callbacks._0&term=madonna+ghosttown

See that the callback is introduced by $http.jsonp and it would work correctly. The problem is, that the call encodes the url and replaces '+' with '%2B'. This breaks the Api and returns an empty array.

The call will look like the subsequent then:

https://itunes.apple.com/search?callback=angular.callbacks._0&term=madonna%2Bghosttown

How can i force $http to not substitute the '+' which separates the search terms? Following code block shows my call.

$http.jsonp("http://itunes.apple.com/search", {
                            params: {
                                "callback": "JSON_CALLBACK",
                                "term": "madonna+ghosttown"
                            }
                        }).success(function (data, status, headers, config) {
                            console.log(data);
                        }).error(function (data, status, headers, config) {
                            console.log(data);
                        });

I would really appreciate your help here. Cheers, Ben

I propose two possible solutions.

As I see it, the problem stems from Angular's $httpParamSerializer which automatically encodes URL parameters.

The first solution is to not use the params key at all and append the URL parameters manually to the URL, like this:

$http.jsonp("http://itunes.apple.com/search?callback=JSON_CALLBACK&term=madonna+ghosttown");

A second solution could be to override the default $httpParamSerializer that is used by Angular's $http (see $http API documentation, chapter "Usage", config key "paramsSerializer"). A (overly simplistic) example would be the following code, which does not encode parameters at all:

$http.jsonp("http://itunes.apple.com/search", {
  params: {
    "callback": "JSON_CALLBACK",
     "term": "madonna+ghosttown"
  },
  paramsSerializer: function(param) {
    return param;
  }
});