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6.6 HTML URL Encode

• A URL is another word for a web address.
• A URL can be composed of words (e.g. w3schools.com), or an Internet Protocol (IP) address (e.g. 192.68.20.50).
• Most people enter the name when surfing, because names are easier to remember than numbers.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator

• Web browsers request pages from web servers by using a URL.
• A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is used to address a document (or other data) on the web.
• A web address like https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp follows these syntax rules:

scheme://prefix.domain:port/path/filename

Explanation:

• scheme - defines the type of Internet service (most common is http or https)
• prefix - defines a domain prefix (default for http is www)
• domain - defines the Internet domain name (like w3schools.com)
• port - defines the port number at the host (default for http is 80)
• path - defines a path at the server (If omitted: the root directory of the site)
• filename - defines the name of a document or resource

Common URL Schemes

The table below lists some common schemes:

Scheme	Short for	Used for
http	HyperText Transfer Protocol	Common web pages. Not encrypted
https	Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol	Secure web pages. Encrypted
ftp	File Transfer Protocol	Downloading or uploading files
file		A file on your computer

URL Encoding

• URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. If a URL contains characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted.
• URL encoding converts non-ASCII characters into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet.
• URL encoding replaces non-ASCII characters with a "%" followed by hexadecimal digits.
• URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a plus (+) sign, or %20.

ASCII Encoding Examples

• Your browser will encode input, according to the character-set used in your page.
• The default character-set in HTML5 is UTF-8.

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