How to deal with special characters in rest filters

Special characters in SharePoint Rest filters

You might have noticed while using SharePoint filters with special characters such as '&', '@' or '!' etc. you get error as we need to use encodeURIComponent in the rest api filtering. Below is the working example of filtering data from rest api having special character.

Code - 

function matchDataFromSPList(val){

        $.ajax({

                url: _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl + "/_api/web/lists/getbyTitle('ListName')/items?$filter= ColumnName eq '"+encodeURIComponent(val)+"'",

                type: "GET",

                headers: {

                        "Accept": "application/json;odata=verbose"

                },

                async: false, 

                success: function(data) {                                                                       

                     if (data.d.results.length > 0) { 

                         

                       }          

                },               

                error: function (error) {  

                      alert(JSON.stringify(error)); 

                }         

      });

}