Which characters make a URL invalid?

Question

Which characters make a URL invalid?

Are these valid URLs?

• example.com/file[/].html
• http://example.com/file[/].html<

Answer 1

In general URIs as defined by RFC 3986 (see Section 2: Characters) may contain any of the following 84 characters:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-._~:/?#[]@!$&'()*+,;=

Note that this list doesn't state where in the URI these characters may occur.

Any other character needs to be encoded with the percent-encoding (%hh). Each part of the URI has further restrictions about what characters need to be represented by an percent-encoded word.