Hi,

Wireshark begs to differ. See screenshot: 
www.adopenstatic.com/temp/wireshark1.jpg<http://www.adopenstatic.com/temp/wireshark1.jpg>

+ in querystrings are perfectly valid. In the URL stem %20 is for a space and 
%2B for a + sign. That is because they are reserved in the stem and need to be 
escaped. In the querystring, + has no special meaning, and there is no need to 
encode it. And certainly not encode it with a %20, which has a different 
meaning to a +

Cheers
Ken

________________________________
From: Lenny Bensman [[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, 13 June 2009 3:04 PM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: Re: OT URL characters

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]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Kennedy, Jim
<[email protected]<mailto:[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

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