URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are the addresses used to access web pages and resources on the internet. Sometimes, URLs may contain special characters or spaces that need to be encoded in order to be properly understood by web browsers and servers. Encoding a URL means converting special characters into a format that can be safely transmitted and understood by computers. On the other hand, decoding a URL means converting the encoded characters back to their original form.
URLs are made up of a combination of alphanumeric characters and special characters. However, some special characters have special meanings in URLs, such as the question mark (?), ampersand (&), and equals sign (=), which are used to separate different parts of a URL. If a URL contains special characters that are not properly encoded, it can cause errors or misinterpretation by web servers and browsers.
URL encoding is the process of converting special characters in a URL into a format that can be transmitted and understood by computers. This is done by replacing each special character with a percent sign (%) followed by two hexadecimal digits that represent the character's ASCII code.
Let's say we have the following URL:
https://www.example.com/search?query=hello world
To encode this URL, we replace the space between "hello" and "world" with "%20", which is the URL-encoded representation of a space. The encoded URL would be:
https://www.example.com/search?query=hello%20world