Is a URL allowed to contain a space?

Question

Is a URI (specifically an HTTP URL) allowed to contain one or more space characters? If a URL must be encoded, is + just a commonly followed convention

Answer 1

Can someone point to an RFC indicating that a URL with a space must be encoded?

URIs, and thus URLs, are defined in RFC 3986.

If you look at the grammar defined over there you will eventually note that a space character never can be part of a syntactically legal URL, thus the term "URL with a space" is a contradiction in itself.

Answer 2

Shorter answer: no, you must encode a space; it is correct to encode a space as +, but only in the query string; in the path you must use %20.

Answer 3

Yes, the space is usually encoded to "%20" though. Any parameters that pass to a URL should be encoded, simply for safety reasons.

Answer 4

URL can have an Space Character in them and they will be displayed as %20 in most of the browsers, but browser encoding rules change quite often and we cannot depend on how a browser will display the URL.

So Instead you can replace the Space Character in the URL with any character that you think shall make the URL More readable and ' Pretty ' ;) ..... O so general characters that are preferred are "-","_","+" .... but these aren't the compulsions so u can use any of the character that is not supposed to be in the URL Already.

Please avoid the %,&,},{,],[,/,>,< as the URL Space Character Replacement as they can pull up an error on certain browsers and Platforms.

As you can see the Stak overflow itself uses the '-' character as Space(%20) replacement.

Have an Happy questioning.