What are the Characters %3D, %20, %26 in URL?

Hello to all my dear friends!

We have seen certain characters at times in the URL like “%3D” or “%20” or “%26”. Now it is important to know what are these.

Let us understand what are these characters.

A URL is of the form https://thestorywire.com. But at times URL also consists of space or double quote (“) or single quote (‘) or and symbol (&) or equals (=) symbol. Therefore to have proper and safe transfer or data to web server, browser encodes such special characters.

UTF-8 is the common character encoding standard used to encode special characters for a safe electronic transmission. UTF-8 stands for Unicode Transformation Format 8 bit. Almost every webpage on the internet is stored as UTF-8 encoded. It succeeds the ASCII character encoding.

So a URL of the form https://thestorywire.com?param=value is encoded as:

https%3A%2F%2Fthestorywire.com%3Fparam%3Dvalue

A quick handy command line tool to encode URL on linux is to use jq.

printf %s 'https://thestorywire.com?param=value' | jq -sRr @uri
                                                                                             
https%3A%2F%2Fthestorywire.com%3Fparam%3Dvalue

The colon (:), slash (/), question mark (?), equal to (=) all special characters are encoded.

URL encoding replaces unsafe character with a percent (%) symbol followed by two hexadecimal digits.

Commonly Encoded Characters in URL

Javascript Function to Encode and Decode URL

Apart from the quick command line tool shared above, javascript has functions to encode and decode url.

const url = "https://thestorywire.com?param=value" 
const encodedURI = encodeURIComponent(url) // Outputs https%3A%2F%2Fthestorywire.com%3Fparam%3Dvalue
console.log(encodedURI) // Outputs https%3A%2F%2Fthestorywire.com%3Fparam%3Dvalue

const decodedURI = decodeURIComponent(encodedURI)
console.log(decodedURI) // Outputs https://thestorywire.com?param=value