Question mark in the middle of a url variable?

Question

If I have a variable to pass through a url and it has a question mark in it, do I just need to escape the question mark? If not how can I make sure it passes through like it

Answer 1

A question mark URL encodes as %3F. But you should use a proper encoder for the whole thing rather than manually encoding a character.

Answer 2

According to my experience of trying to make a JavaScript search engine that links to Google, just replace the question marks with %3F. A url reads the first two characters on the right of a % as hexadecimal format.

Answer 3

Here's a full list of URL encoding characters. If you're using PHP for a server side language, you can use something like...

$nice_url = urlencode("http://your.old.url");

Other languages will have similar functions build in (or you can find one online). This will take care of your question mark (and other url issues).