Why do urls need to be encoded

Here are the common ones, click the method name to find more info. This is done using String. Alternatively, type anything on the Encoded field, when you press the URL Decode button, the decoded string will be displayed on the Not encoded field. Not encoded Encoded. Permadi Terms of Use Privacy Policy. URL Encoded. If you were to put an ampersand into one of those values, it would look like the separator between the end of a value and the beginning of the next key. So for special characters like this, we use percent encoding so that we can be sure that the data is unambiguously encoded.

The space character is excluded because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URI are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word- processing programs. Whitespace is also used to delimit URI in many contexts. Let's break down your question. Why do you need to encode URL? A URL is composed of only a limited number of characters and those are digits , letters A-Z, a-z , and a few special characters "-", ".

So does it mean that we cannot use any other character? The answer to this question is "YES". So if you want to transmit any character which is not a member of the above mentioned digits, letters, and special chars , then we need to encode them. Is this enough for URL encoding? No this is not enough, there's a lot about URL encoding but here, I'm not gonna make it a pretty big, boring technical answer. Well, you do so because every different browsers knows how the string that makes up the URL is encoded.

It could be latin-1 it could be unicode. It needs normalized to something that is understood universally. How are we doing? Please help us improve Stack Overflow. Take our short survey. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Why do you need to encode URLs? However, note that certain services have several parameters that may result in long URLs. Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Routes Directions API. Places Places API. Additional Resources.