URL encoding is a way in which some characters are encoded or replaced by % followed by the hexadecimal equivalent of the character.
Developers usually use encoding because there are certain cases when an intended character or representation is sent to the server but when received, the character changes or gets misinterpreted because of transport issues. Certain protocols require some of its parameters, to be percent-encoded to make it distinct from rest of the URL for the browser.
Example: “<” is represented as “%3c” in percent encoding format.
Reserved characters have special meanings in the context of URLs and must be encoded into another form, which is the percent-encoded form to avoid any sort of ambiguity.
A classic example of such ambiguity can be “/”, which is used to separate paths in a URL, so if the need arises to transmit the “/” character in a URL, Then we must encode it accordingly so that the receiver or parser of the URL does not get confused and parse the URL incorrectly. Therefore, in that case, “/” is encoded into “%2F” (ASCII Encoding), this will be decoded into “/” by the URL parser.
The following unrestricted characters are not encoded as part of the URL encoding technique:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 – _ . ~
The following restricted characters are encoded as part of the URL encoding technique:
! * ‘ ( ) ; : @ & = + $ , / ? # [ ]
