When is a URL encoded?

Question

When there are spaces in a URL like

http://example.com/this is not url enocoded

it is obvious, that the URL will end up as

http://example.com/this%20is%20not%20url%20encoded

When and what will encode my URL?

• Should links that I create to my URL be encoded in my HTML documents?
• Does the browser do the encoding?
• Does the server do the encoding?

Answer 1

Browsers will automatically encode URL's with spaces, assuming you have linked to the file properly.

Create a file on your server called test one.html link to it or simply load it directly in your browser using spaces in the URL bar. http://www.example.com/test one.html

It will become test%20one.html

It's not and ideal way of naming or linking to files but the browser will handle it just fine. If you have a lot of static files with spaces which you'd like to update to - dashes or hyphens. A great program to use is

http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php

Answer 2

While browsers can automatically make the conversion from spaces to encoded versions, you should ensure that your server software outputs correctly encoded URLs.

Not all browsers / bots can do the encoding properly.

If you do not have a CMS, you should encode the URLs in your HTML content.

Best way is to restrict to not using URLs with special characters.