Re: [tlug] Website Question(s)

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

Matt Gushee wrote:

>> [MS] That is indeed some crazy and bizarre, wacky mixed-up stuff.
>
>
> Not at all. It's called URL encoding, and it provides a means to use 
> any character in a URL, even those that are technically illegal. It's 
> a form of escaping, rather like the \ that you often need to use in 
> the shell or in regular expressions. '%' is the escape character, and 
> the next two characters are the character code (in UTF-8, if I'm not 
> mistaken). E.g., '%7E' is the code for '~'.
>
> There are a number of characters that have special meaning in URLs, 
> and *must* be escaped when they are used without those special 
> meanings. '&', '?', and '@' are some common ones. There are other 
> characters that should be escaped in order to be extra-safe. The tilde 
> '~' is one of those, though I don't really know what problem it could 
> potentially cause. Here's a simple tutorial for ya:
>
>   http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm
>
> For more info, just google for "url encoding." You'll get lots of hits.


Thank you very much for this answer.  One more question - would it be 
better to set up my links with "%7E" in stead of "~"?  I'm assuming not 
and I hadn't worried about it until the issue of a friend having trouble 
opening some of my pages came up.  What I still find strange though, is 
how I'll click on one of my links which is set up with the "~" mark, and 
sometimes that's exactly what is displayed in the address bar and other 
times it's been converted.  If it were all one way or the other, I would 
just get used to it, but the erratic behavior part of it is what's 
confusing.

Thanks again for the info!

Lyle