URL - Uniform Resource Locator

URL - Uniform Resource Locator

URL can consist of words, such as “w3school.com.cn”, or an Internet Protocol (IP) address: 192.168.1.253. Most people type the domain name of a website when they surf the web because names are easier to remember than numbers.

Grammar rules:

scheme:<span style="color: #008000;">//</span><span style="color: #008000;">host.domain:port/path/filename</span>

Explanation:

• scheme - Defines the type of Internet service. The most common type is http
• host - Define the domain host (the default host for http is www)
• domain - Define Internet domain name, such as w3school.com.cn
• :port - Define the port number on the host (the default port number for http is 80)
• path - defines the path on the server (if omitted, the document must be in the root of the website).
• filename - defines the name of the document/resource

URL Schemes

Here are some of the most popular schemes:

Scheme	Access	for...
http	Hypertext Transfer Protocol	Ordinary web pages starting with http://. No encryption.
https	Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol	Secure web page. Encrypt all information exchanged.
ftp	File Transfer Protocol	Used to download or upload files to the website.
file

URL encoding

URL encoding converts characters into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet.

URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character set.

Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, URLs must be converted to valid ASCII format.

URL encoding uses "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits to replace non-ASCII characters.

URL cannot contain spaces. URL encoding usually uses + to replace spaces.

URL encoding example

Characters	URL encoding
€	%80
£	%A3
©	%A9
®	%AE
À	%C0
Á	%C1
Â	%C2
Ã	%C3
Ä	%C4
Å	%C5

For a complete URL encoding reference, visit our URL Encoding Reference Manual.