Question 1

What characters must be URL encoded?

Accepted Answer

Required: spaces, angle brackets, quotes, pipes, backslash, caret, brackets, backtick, and non-ASCII. Reserved chars when used literally: :/?#[]@!&()*+,;=. Safe unencoded: A-Z a-z 0-9 - _ . ~

Question 2

Why does my URL break when I paste it?

Accepted Answer

Special characters (question mark, ampersand, equals, spaces) may be interpreted as URL syntax. Encode user input before inserting into URLs. Check for double-encoding if percent appears as %25.

Question 3

What character encoding should I use?

Accepted Answer

UTF-8 is the modern standard - it handles all characters and is backward-compatible with ASCII. Use it unless you have specific legacy requirements.

Question 4

Will encoding/decoding change my data?

Accepted Answer

Proper encoding is reversible. However, using wrong encoding can corrupt special characters. Always use the same encoding for encode and decode.

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