Jumping in late on the thread, but I thought it would be beneficial to offer a correction.
While you often do see + as a substitute for space in URLs, note that it is for display purposes only. Plus sign never "hits the wire" for purposes of space escaping. So even though the browser may be displaying http://www.google.com/search?q=url+encoding for the link, what actually hits the wire is: GET /search?q=url%20encoding HTTP/1.1 ... Lenny On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Ben Scott <[email protected]> wrote: > 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/> ~ > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
