Difference between Url Encode and HTML encode

Question

What’s the difference between an URL Encode and a HTML Encode?

Answer 1

Both HTML and URL's are essentially very constrained languages. As a language they add meaning to specific keywords or operators. For both of these languages though, keywords are almost always single characters. For example

• HTML: > and <
• URL: / and :

In the use of each language though it is possible to use these constructs in a manner that does not ensure the meaning of the language. For instance this post contains a > character. I do not want it to be interpreted as HTML, just text.

This is where Encode and Decode methods come into play. These methods will respectively take a string and convert any of the characters that would otherwise be treated as keywords into an escaped form which will not be interpreted as part of the language.

For instance: Passing > into HtmlEncode will return >