[url] URL encoding the space character: + or %20?

When is a space in a URL encoded to +, and when is it encoded to %20?

A space may only be encoded to "+" in the "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" content-type key-value pairs query part of an URL. In my opinion, this is a MAY, not a MUST. In the rest of URLs, it is encoded as %20.

In my opinion, it's better to always encode spaces as %20, not as "+", even in the query part of an URL, because it is the HTML specification (RFC-1866) that specified that space characters should be encoded as "+" in "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" content-type key-value pairs (see paragraph 8.2.1. subparagraph 1.)

This way of encoding form data is also given in later HTML specifications. For example, look for relevant paragraphs about application/x-www-form-urlencoded in HTML 4.01 Specification, and so on.

Here is a sample string in URL where the HTML specification allows encoding spaces as pluses: "http://example.com/over/there?name=foo+bar". So, only after "?", spaces can be replaced by pluses. In other cases, spaces should be encoded to %20. But since it's hard to correctly determine the context, it's the best practice to never encode spaces as "+".

I would recommend to percent-encode all character except "unreserved" defined in RFC-3986, p.2.3

unreserved = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." / "_" / "~"

The implementation depends on the programming language that you chose.

If your URL contains national characters, first encode them to UTF-8 and then percent-encode the result.

This confusion is because URLs are still 'broken' to this day.

Take "http://www.google.com" for instance. This is a URL. A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator and is really a pointer to a web page (in most cases). URLs actually have a very well-defined structure since the first specification in 1994.

We can extract detailed information about the "http://www.google.com" URL:

+---------------+-------------------+
|      Part     |      Data         |
+---------------+-------------------+
|  Scheme       | http              |
|  Host         | www.google.com    |
+---------------+-------------------+

If we look at a more complex URL such as:

"https://bob:[email protected]:8080/file;p=1?q=2#third"

we can extract the following information:

+-------------------+---------------------+
|        Part       |       Data          |
+-------------------+---------------------+
|  Scheme           | https               |
|  User             | bob                 |
|  Password         | bobby               |
|  Host             | www.lunatech.com    |
|  Port             | 8080                |
|  Path             | /file;p=1           |
|  Path parameter   | p=1                 |
|  Query            | q=2                 |
|  Fragment         | third               |
+-------------------+---------------------+

https://bob:[email protected]:8080/file;p=1?q=2#third
\___/   \_/ \___/ \______________/ \__/\_______/ \_/ \___/
  |      |    |          |          |      | \_/  |    |
Scheme User Password    Host       Port  Path |   | Fragment
        \_____________________________/       | Query
                       |               Path parameter
                   Authority

The reserved characters are different for each part.

For HTTP URLs, a space in a path fragment part has to be encoded to "%20" (not, absolutely not "+"), while the "+" character in the path fragment part can be left unencoded.

Now in the query part, spaces may be encoded to either "+" (for backwards compatibility: do not try to search for it in the URI standard) or "%20" while the "+" character (as a result of this ambiguity) has to be escaped to "%2B".

This means that the "blue+light blue" string has to be encoded differently in the path and query parts:

"http://example.com/blue+light%20blue?blue%2Blight+blue".

From there you can deduce that encoding a fully constructed URL is impossible without a syntactical awareness of the URL structure.

This boils down to:

You should have %20 before the ? and + after.

Source

I would recommend %20.

Are you hard-coding them?

This is not very consistent across languages, though. If I'm not mistaken, in PHP urlencode() treats spaces as + whereas Python's urlencode() treats them as %20.

EDIT:

It seems I'm mistaken. Python's urlencode() (at least in 2.7.2) uses quote_plus() instead of quote() and thus encodes spaces as "+". It seems also that the W3C recommendation is the "+" as per here: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4.1

And in fact, you can follow this interesting debate on Python's own issue tracker about what to use to encode spaces: http://bugs.python.org/issue13866.

EDIT #2:

I understand that the most common way of encoding " " is as "+", but just a note, it may be just me, but I find this a bit confusing:

import urllib
print(urllib.urlencode({' ' : '+ '})

>>> '+=%2B+'