Spaces in URLs

Question

w3fools claims that URLs can contain spaces  http   w3fools com  html urlencode  Is this true  How can a URL contain an un-encoded space   I m under the impression the request line of an HTTP Request uses a space as a delimiter  being formatted as  the method  space  the path  space  the protocol    GET  index html http 1 1   Therefore how can a URL contain a space  If it can  where did the practice of replacing spaces with   come from

User · Answer

The information there is I think partially correct:

That's not true. An URL can use spaces. Nothing defines that a space is replaced with a + sign.

As you noted, an URL can NOT use spaces. The HTTP request would get screwed over. I'm not sure where the + is defined, though %20 is standard.

User · Answer

A URL must not contain a literal space  It must either be encoded using the percent-encoding or a different encoding that uses URL-safe characters  like application x-www-form-urlencoded that uses   instead of  20 for spaces    But whether the statement is right or wrong depends on the interpretation  Syntactically  a URI must not contain a literal space and it must be encoded  semantically  a  20 is not a space  obviously  but it represents a space

User · Answer

Spaces are simply replaced by   20  like    http   www example com my 20beautiful 20page

User · Answer

They are indeed fools  If you look at RFC 3986 Appendix A  you will see that  space  is simply not mentioned anywhere in the grammar for defining a URL  Since it s not mentioned anywhere in the grammar  the only way to encode a space is with percent-encoding   20    In fact  the RFC even states that spaces are delimiters and should be ignored      In some cases  extra whitespace  spaces  line-breaks  tabs  etc   may      have to be added to break a long URI across lines   The whitespace      should be ignored when the URI is extracted    and     For robustness  software that accepts user-typed URI should attempt      to recognize and strip both delimiters and embedded whitespace    Curiously  the use of   as an encoding for space isn t mentioned in the RFC  although it is reserved as a sub-delimeter  I suspect that its use is either just convention or covered by a different RFC  possibly HTTP

[http] Spaces in URLs?

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