Why should I use urlencode?

Question

I am writing a web application and learning how to urlencode html links...

All the urlencode questions here (see tag below) are \"How to...?\" questions.

M

Answer 1

Two reasons I could think of:

• It really depends on how you parse your query server side. E.g. passing parameters using HTTP's GET request will have problems if there are characters like & inside some parameter.
• It allows you to handle non-ansi characters the way you'd like to (you dictate the encoding). Otherwise the browser might pass them in some random encoding (don't think it's really defined in any standard; correct me if I'm wrong).