Currently our User's can have openids that might require url/uri encoding.

Fictitious Example:
https://www.earthsystemgrid.org/myopenid/nathan hook

When properly encoded the above url will look like the following:
https://www.earthsystemgrid.org/myopenid/nathan%20hook

Unfortunately, URL/URI encoding is a one direction encoding. Once a URL/URI is encoded it is difficult programatically to determine if a URL/URI is properly decoded.

For example, if I chose the following for my openid (looks suspiciously like the encoded url above):
https://www.earthsystemgrid.org/myopenid/nathan%20hook

The encoding for the new url would be the following:
https://www.earthsystemgrid.org/myopenid/nathan%2520hook