In a URL should spaces be encoded using 20 or

Question

In a URL  should I encode the spaces using  20 or    For example  in the following example  which one is correct   www mydomain com type xbox 20360 www mydomain com type xbox 360   Our company is leaning to the former  but using the Java method URLEncoder encode String  String  with  xbox 360   and  UTF-8   returns the latter   So  what s the difference

User · Answer

This confusion is because URL is 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 address   www google com          --------------- -------------------         If we look at a more   complex URL such as    https   bob bobby www lunatech com 8080 file p 1 q 2 third  we can   extract the following information     ------------------- ---------------------           Part               Data             ------------------- ---------------------     Scheme             https                    User               bob                      Password           bobby                    Host address       www lunatech com         Port               8080                     Path                file                    Path parameters    p 1                      Query parameters   q 2                      Fragment           third                  ------------------- ---------------------       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    What this boils down to is   you should have  20 before the   and   after  Source

User · Answer

It shouldn t matter  any more than if you encoded the letter A as  41   However  if you re dealing with a system that doesn t recognize one form  it seems like you re just going to have to give it what it expects regardless of what the  spec  says

User · Answer

According to the W3C  and they are the official source on these things   a space character in the query string  and in the query string only  may be encoded as either   20  or      From the section  Query strings  under  Recommendations       Within the query string  the plus sign is reserved as shorthand notation for a space  Therefore  real plus signs must be encoded  This method was used to make query URIs easier to pass in systems which did not allow spaces    According to section 3 4 of RFC2396 which is the official specification on URIs in general  the  query  component is URL-dependent      3 4  Query Component           The query component is a string of information to be interpreted by           the resource      query            uric       Within a query component  the characters                                 amp                   and     are reserved    It is therefore a bug in the other software if it does not accept URLs with spaces in the query string encoded as     characters   As for the third part of your question  one way  though slightly ugly  to fix the output from URLEncoder encode   is to then call replaceAll         20   on the return value

User · Answer

You can use either - which means most people opt for     as it s more human readable

User · Answer

When encoding query values  either form  plus or percent-20  is valid  however  since the bandwidth of the internet isn t infinite  you should use plus  since it s two fewer bytes

User · Answer

Form data  for GET or POST  is usually encoded as application x-www-form-urlencoded  this specifies   for spaces   URLs are encoded as RFC 1738 which specifies  20   In theory I think you should have  20 before the   and   after   example com foo 20bar foo bar

[url] In a URL, should spaces be encoded using %20 or +?

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