Special Characters in URL Query Parameters

A URL has encoding for special characters. Alphanumeric characters and most common characters remain the same. All other characters must be encoded in the form %xy where xy is a 2 digit hexadecimal representation of a character.

For more information, refer to: http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/Overview.html

Here are some special characters, and their encoding:

Character	Meaning in the URL	Encoding
&	Query parameter separator.	%26
[space]	Not applicable: the space character is automatically transformed to %20 by Internet Explorer.	%20 or +
+	Encoding of space character.	%2b
%	Encoding of a special character.	%25
#	Fragment delimiter.	%23

NOTES:

The # character is a special character in the URL protocol to delimit a fragment. As a result, all that comes after the # character will be skipped. Therefore, the # character must be encoded with %23.

Special characters that are not included in standard ASCII are not supported by URL. For example, characters like é, à, ã, É, and å are not supported.