title: Is there a way to get httr to ignore percent characters in the url? Or NOT percent-encode something?
body: <p>I am trying to use R to get some data from an API. The administrator of the API has constructed it so that the UN and PW are part of the parameters in the URL string. For example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>https://theSite.net/Something/SomethingWS.aspx?username=myUsername&amp;password=myPassword&amp;action=DoThisThing
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This works fine if I create my request using RCurl. However, I am trying to use httr (wrapper for RCurl), because I want to be able to test for any errors that may occur in getting the data. For example, something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    resp &lt;- GET(theURL)
      warn_for_status(resp)
      if (status_code(resp) == 200) { WE GOT GOOD STUFF }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So to use httr, I do something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>theRequest &lt;- GET(theURL, query = list(username = myUN, password = myPW, action = "DoThisThing"))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This breaks. I realized my password has a %2 in it. httr attempts to do the right thing by changing the % to %25, so my password now has %252 everywhere %2 should be, and the request gets rejected. Is there a way to tell httr NOT to 'fix' my password, or percent-encode it I guess?</p>
  
  <p>I attempted to use my credentials in "authenticate", but the server rejected that too:</p>
  
  <pre><code>theRequest &lt;- GET(theURL, authenticate(myUN, myPW), query = list(action = "DoThisThing"))
  </code></pre>