A URL is another word for a web address.
A URL can be composed of words (w3schools.com), or an Internet Protocol (IP) address (192.68.20.50).
Most people enter the name when surfing, because names are easier to remember than numbers.
Web browsers request pages from web servers by using a URL.
When you click on a link in an HTML page, an underlying <a> tag points to an address on the web.
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is used to address a document (or other data) on the web.
A web address, like http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp follows these syntax rules:
Explanation:
The table below lists some common schemes:
Scheme | Short for | Used for |
---|---|---|
http | HyperText Transfer Protocol | Common web pages. Not encrypted |
https | Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol | Secure web pages. Encrypted |
ftp | File Transfer Protocol | Downloading or uploading files |
file | A file on your computer |
URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set.
Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted into ASCII.
URL encoding converts characters into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet.
URL encoding replaces non ASCII characters with a "%" followed by hexadecimal digits.
URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a plus (+) sign, or %20.
If you click "Submit", the browser will URL encode the input before it is sent to the server.
A page at the server will display the received input.
Try some other input and click Submit again.
Your browser will encode input, according to the character-set used in your page.
The default character-set in HTML5 is UTF-8.
Character | From Windows-1252 | From UTF-8 |
---|---|---|
€ | %80 | %E2%82%AC |
£ | %A3 | %C2%A3 |
© | %A9 | %C2%A9 |
® | %AE | %C2%AE |
À | %C0 | %C3%80 |
Á | %C1 | %C3%81 |
 | %C2 | %C3%82 |
à | %C3 | %C3%83 |
Ä | %C4 | %C3%84 |
Å | %C5 | %C3%85 |
For a complete reference of all URL encodings, visit our URL Encoding Reference.