About URL Encoding

URL encoding is used for transferring special or non-ASCII characters embedded into URL:s and posted form data (on the web). It is also known as percent-encoding or WWW-form encoding.

The online URL encoder tool encodes data as follows:

	Input Conversion – The input is first converted to a binary byte stream. Both URL and WWW-form uses UTF-8, as this is mandated for usage in URL:s.
	Percent Encoding – Each non-ASCII or special character is encoded as a "%" character followed by two hexadecimal digits for the UTF-8 representation. If the UTF-8 representation requires several bytes, multiple "%" characters is used (high endian first).
	URL Exceptions – The URL encoding does NOT encode "=", "&" or other special character used in URL:s. To encode such character inside a parameter, use the WWW-form encoding for that part.
	WWW-form Exceptions – The WWW-form encoding uses "+" instead of "%20" for the space character. It also normalizes newline characters to "%0D%0A" (i.e. <CR><LF>).

The URL decoder tool allows for easy viewing of URL:s and WWW form data encoded in either of these ways.

See the Wikipedia article on Percent-encoding for more info.