HTML URL Encoding

URL encoding converts characters into a format that can be safely transmitted over the Internet.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator

Web browsers request pages from web servers by using a URL.

The URL is the address of a web page like: http://www.w3schools.com.

URL Encoding

URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set.

Since URLs often contains characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted. URL encoding converts the URL into a valid ASCII format.

URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits corresponding to the character values in the ISO-8859-1 character-set.

URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a + sign.

Try It Yourself

If you click the "Submit" button below, the browser will URL encode the input before it is sent to the server. A page at the server will display the received input.

Try some other input and click Submit again.

URL Encoding Examples

For a complete reference of all URL encodings, visit our URL Encoding Reference.

Stylus Studio® XML Development Environment

Stylus Studio® 2010 XML Enterprise Suite raises the bar for productivity in XML development tools. Millions of XML developers and data integration specialists turn to Stylus Studio's comprehensive and intuitive XML toolset to tackle today's advanced XML data transformation and aggregation challenges.

XML Pipeline Editor, Debugger and Code Generator DataDirect XML Converters XQuery Mapper, Editor, Debugger, and Profiler XSLT Mapper, Editor, Debugger, Designer, and Profiler Java and C# for .Net Code Generation XML Schema Designer With Documentation Generator XML Editor With Full XPath Integration Download a free trial now