Why URLs need encoding
URLs can only contain a limited set of ASCII characters. Spaces, accents and characters with special meaning (such as &, ?, # and /) must be written as a % followed by two hex digits of each UTF-8 byte. A space becomes %20 and "ë" becomes %C3%AB.
Component vs whole URL
Use query value mode for one parameter value. It encodes &, =, / and ?, so they can't break the URL structure. Use whole URL mode to clean up a full address while keeping its ://, slashes and query separators. When decoding, a + is treated as a space, which is how HTML forms submit values.
Frequently asked questions
What is %20?
The percent-encoding of a space character.
Should I encode the whole URL or just the parameters?
Encode each parameter value separately, with query value mode.
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