What's the correct encoding of HTTP get request strings?

Question

Does the HTTP standard or something define which encoding should be used on special characters before they are encoded in url with %XXs? If it doesn\'t define is there a way

Answer 1

Per RFC 2616,

   CHAR           = 

and

 token          = 1*

   separators     = "(" | ")" | "<" | ">" | "@"
                  | "," | ";" | ":" | "\" | <">
                  | "/" | "[" | "]" | "?" | "="
                  | "{" | "}" | SP | HT

and URIs are tokens with various specific separators. So, in theory, nothing but US-ASCII should be there. (In practice, since the ISO-8859-1 extension to US-ASCII is used in many other spots in the HTTP specs, it's not unusual to find HTTP implementations which support ISO-8859-1 rather than just US-ASCII, but strictly speaking that's not standards-compliant HTTP).