Is a URL allowed to contain a space?

Question

Is a URI (specifically an HTTP URL) allowed to contain one or more space characters? If a URL must be encoded, is + just a commonly followed convention

Answer 1

Why does it have to be encoded? A request looks like this:

GET /url HTTP/1.1
(Ignoring headers)

There are 3 fields separated by a white space. If you put a space in your url:

GET /url end_url HTTP/1.1

You know have 4 fields, the HTTP server will tell you it is an invalid request.

GET /url%20end_url HTTP/1.1

3 fields => valid

Note: in the query string (after ?), a space is usually encoded as a +

GET /url?var=foo+bar HTTP/1.1 

rather than

GET /url?var=foo%20bar HTTP/1.1