CODEWITHSUNDEEP
urlurlencode
john c. j.
john c. j.

Reputation: 1185

Apostrophe (valid char) is percent-encoded - but only sometimes

Try to use Google to find Wikipedia article about De Morgan's laws.

Click the link, and see the URL. At least in Chrome, it will be 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws

' is percent-encoded as %27, despite it is a valid URL character (and even more, if you manually change it in address bar from %27 to ', it will work). Why?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 246

Answers (1)

hyde
hyde

Reputation: 62858

While aposthrope may be valid char, URL-encoded version is also equally valid!

Not sure if there is a hard reason, so this is kinda "soft" answer: Aposthrope (and/or double quote) needs to be escaped somehow if URL is ever put into for example JSON or XML. URL encoding them as part of sanitizing URLs solves this one way, and protects against poor JSON/XML handling and programmer errors. It's just pragmatic.

Decoding these certain valid chars in HTTP responses' headers etc (so browser shows them "right") should be possible and maybe nice, but extra work and code. Note that there are also chars where decoding would not be ok, so this would have to be selective! So at least in this case it just wasn't done I guess. So if a char gets URL-encoded at any step of the whole page loading operation chain, they stay that way.

Upvotes: 1

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