HTML URL Encoding

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

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URL – Universal 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.

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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.

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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.

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URL Encoding Examples

Character	URL-encoding
€	%80
£	%A3
©	%A9
®	%AE
À	%C0
Á	%C1
Â	%C2
Ã	%C3
Ä	%C4
Å	%C5

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