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URL encoding is the practice of translating unprintable characters or characters with special meaning within URLs to a representation that is unambiguous and universally accepted by web browsers and servers. These characters include:
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ASCII control characters - Unprintable characters typically used for output control. Character ranges 00-1F hex (0-31 decimal) and 7F (127 decimal). A complete encoding table is given below.
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Non-ASCII control characters - These are characters beyond the ASCII character set of 128 characters. This range is part of the ISO-Latin character set and ncludes the entire "top half" of the ISO-Latin set 80-FF hex (128-255 decimal). A complete encoding table is given below.
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Reserved characters - These are special characters such as the dollar sign, ampersand, plus, common, forward slash, colon, semi-colon, equals sign, question mark, and "at" symbol. All of these can have different meanings inside a URL so need to be encoded. A complete encoding table is given below.
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Unsafe characters - These are space, quotation marks, less than symbol, greater than symbol, pound character, percent character, Left Curly Brace, Right Curly Brace , Pipe, Backslash, Caret, Tilde, Left Square Bracket , Right Square Bracket, Grave Accent. These character present the possibility of being misunderstood within URLs for various reasons. These characters should also always be encoded. A complete encoding table is given below.
The encoding notation replaces the desired character with three characters: a percent sign and two hexadecimal digits whose correspond to the position of the character in the ASCII character set.
Example:
One of the most common special characters is the space. You can't type a space in a URL directly. A space position in the character set is 20 hexadecimal. So you can use %20 in place a space when passing your request to the server.
