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URL encoding, officially known as percent-encoding, is a method to encode arbitrary data in a uniform resource identifier (URI) using only the US-ASCII characters legal within a URI. Although it is known as URL encoding , it is also used more generally within the main Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) set, which includes both Uniform Resource ...
The following normalizations are described in RFC 3986 [1] to result in equivalent URIs: . Converting percent-encoded triplets to uppercase. The hexadecimal digits within a percent-encoding triplet of the URI (e.g., %3a versus %3A) are case-insensitive and therefore should be normalized to use uppercase letters for the digits A-F. [2] Example:
Percent-encoding of reserved characters in URLs and query strings can significantly increase their length, and while Apache HTTP Server can handle up to 4,000 characters in a URL, [5] Microsoft Internet Explorer is limited to 2,048 characters in any URL. [6]
Other octets must be percent-encoded. If the data is Base64-encoded, then the data part may contain only valid Base64 characters. [7] Note that Base64-encoded data: URIs use the standard Base64 character set (with '+' and '/' as characters 62 and 63) rather than the so-called "URL-safe Base64" character set.
For example, this is the source of the special handling of plus sign, '+' within browser URL percent encoding (which today, with the deprecation of indexed search, is all but redundant with %20). Also some web servers supporting CGI (e.g., Apache ) will process the query string into command line arguments if it does not contain an equals sign ...
While URIs are limited to a subset of the US-ASCII character set (characters outside that set must be mapped to octets according to some unspecified character encoding, then percent-encoded), IRIs may additionally contain most characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646), [4] [5] including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and ...
URIs which provide a means of locating and retrieving information resources on a network (either on the Internet or on another private network, such as a computer filesystem or an Intranet) are Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Therefore, URLs are a subset of URIs, ie. every URL is a URI (and not necessarily the other way around). [2]
A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, [1] is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), [ 2 ] [ 3 ] although many people use the two terms interchangeably.