[url] What is %2C in a URL?

I'm trying to understand the structure of a URL, and I'm seeing a lot of %2C. I'm guessing this is a result of some encoding. What does that stand for?

This question is related to url url-encoding

The answer is


It's the ASCII keycode in hexadecimal for a comma (,).

You should use your language's URL encoding methods when placing strings in URLs.

You can see a handy list of characters with man ascii. It has this compact diagram available for mapping hexadecimal codes to the character:

   2 3 4 5 6 7       
 -------------      
0:   0 @ P ` p     
1: ! 1 A Q a q     
2: " 2 B R b r     
3: # 3 C S c s     
4: $ 4 D T d t     
5: % 5 E U e u     
6: & 6 F V f v     
7: ' 7 G W g w     
8: ( 8 H X h x     
9: ) 9 I Y i y     
A: * : J Z j z
B: + ; K [ k {
C: , < L \ l |
D: - = M ] m }
E: . > N ^ n ~
F: / ? O _ o DEL

You can also quickly check a character's hexadecimal equivalent with:

$ echo -n , | xxd -p
2c

It's the ASCII keycode in hexadecimal for a comma (,).

i.e. , = %2C

like in my link suppose i want to order by two fields means in my link it will come like

order_by=id%2Cname which is equal to order_by=id,name .


The %2C translates to a comma (,). I saw this while searching for a sentence with a comma in it and on the url, instead of showing a comma, it had %2C.


Another technique that you can use to get the symbol from url gibberish is to open Chrome console with F12 and just paste following javascript:

decodeURIComponent("%2c")

it will decode and return the symbol (or symbols).

enter image description here

Hope this saves you some time.


Simple & Easy answer,

The %2C means , comma in URL. when you add the String "abc,defg" in the url as parameter then that comma in the string which is abc , defg is changed to abc%2Cdefg .There is no need to worry about it.


In Firefox there is Ctrl+Shift+K for the Web console, then you type

;decodeURIComponent("%2c")
  • mind the semicolon in the beginning
  • if you Copy&Paste, you should first enable it (the console will warn you)

and you get the answer:

","