That is correct Hoolio - we are trying to Percent Encode using the URI::encode function.
The oddness (at least to us and our logged entry) is that our encoded string "newString2" seems to have all the percent-encoded AlphaNumeric changes - but the actual Percent sign is not preceding them. There's no Percent sign anywhere in our "encoded" string.
Are we mis-understanding what should have happened or is this perhaps a minor bug of sorts? We expected to see the full https%3a%2f%2f (and other encodings) and all we got was "https3a2f2f". (no percent sign).
That's at least one of the 3 minor issues we had with our iRule.
The other 2 issues as Jim noted are that we lost our '&' and '=' from our original string. I hadn't looked at that yet but suspected that to be a more definitive error in our Rule, perhaps how we used SPLIT or LINDEX.