From http://www.w3schools.com (Copyright Refsnes Data)

HTML URL Encoding

URL encoding converts characters into a format that can be safely transmitted over the Internet.

URL - Universal Resource Locator

Web browsers request pages from web servers by using a URL.

The URL is the address of a web page like: http://www.w3schools.com.

URL Encoding

URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set.

Since URLs often contains characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted. URL encoding converts the URL into a valid ASCII format.

URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits corresponding to the character values in the ISO-8859-1 character-set.

URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a + sign.

Try It Yourself

If you click the "Submit" button below, the browser will URL encode the input before it is sent to the server. A page at the server will display the received input.

Try some other input and click Submit again.

URL Encoding Examples

For a complete reference of all URL encodings, visit our URL Encoding Reference.

From http://www.w3schools.com (Copyright Refsnes Data)