URL Encoding Explained: Why %20 Appears in URLs (and How to Decode It)

You paste a URL into your browser and it looks like this: https://example.com/search?q=hello%20world&filter=price%3E100 What are all those %20 and %3E symbols? Why does a space become %20 ? And why does > become %3E ? This is URL encoding (also called percent-encoding), and understanding it will save you from a category of bugs that trips up developers at every experience level. Why URLs cannot contain raw special characters A URL is a string of ASCII text with strict rules about which chara