A URL is another word for a web address.
A URL can be composed of words, such as “w3schools.com”, or an Internet Protocol (IP) address: 192.68.20.50. Most people enter the name of the website when surfing, because names are easier to remember than numbers.
URL – Uniform Resource Locator
Web browsers request pages from web servers by using a URL.
When you click on a link in an HTML page, an underlying <a> tag points to an address on the world wide web.
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is used to address a document (or other data) on the world wide web.
A web address, like this: http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp follows these syntax rules:
Explanation:
- scheme – defines the type of Internet service. The most common type is http
- host – defines the domain host (the default host for http is www)
- domain – defines the Internet domain name, like w3schools.com
- port – defines the port number at the host (the default port number for http is 80)
- path – defines a path at the server (If omitted, the document must be stored at the root directory of the web site)
- filename – defines the name of a document/resource
Common URL Schemes
The table below lists some common schemes:
Scheme | Short for…. | Which pages will the scheme be used for… |
---|---|---|
http | HyperText Transfer Protocol | Common web pages starts with http://. Not encrypted |
https | Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol | Secure web pages. All information exchanged are encrypted |
ftp | File Transfer Protocol | For downloading or uploading files to a website. Useful for domain maintenance |
file | A file on your computer |
URL Encoding
URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set.
Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format.
URL encoding converts characters into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet.
URL encoding replaces non ASCII characters with a “%” followed by two hexadecimal digits.
URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a + sign.
Try It Yourself
If you click the “Submit” button below, the browser will URL encode the input before it is sent to the server. A page at the server will display the received input.
Try some other input and click Submit again.
URL Encoding Examples
Character | URL-encoding |
---|---|
€ | %80 |
£ | %A3 |
© | %A9 |
® | %AE |
À | %C0 |
Á | %C1 |
 | %C2 |
à | %C3 |
Ä | %C4 |
Å | %C5 |
For a complete reference of all URL encodings, visit our URL Encoding Reference.