On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Kennedy, Jim
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Spaces are not allowed in website URL’s and will blow up often. Correct?
A literal, unencoded space is not allowed in URLs, period. Spaces
are used to delimit fields in the HTTP protocol.
For most software (browsers, etc.), If you enter a space in
something that's going to be a URL, it will be encoded as either a
plus sign (+) or the "%20" sequence others have mentioned.
You can see the plus sign in action with many form submissions, e.g.:
http://www.google.com/search?q=url+encoding
The %20 comes about because an ASCII space has hexadecimal value
0x20. Any non-printable and/or non-ASCII byte in a URL will be
encoded that way.
So you can reference files and such with spaces in them in a URL,
and it may even be displayed nicely, depending on the software you are
using. However, the URL itself will use the encoded form. Since this
tends to confuse humans, it's strongly recommended that you avoid
spaces in anything that will be referenced by URL.
-- Ben
~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
