Uniform or Universal Resource Locator or simply URLs provide a uniform way of identifying resources and information that are available on the web using the internet protocols. The URLs starts with a protocol name that defines which service the user is trying to access. For example in the URL http://www.google.com, the user is trying to access the resource of google using the HTTP protocol, while in the URL ftp://www.codeprogramming.org, the user
maybe trying to upload files on the domain.
Some of the special characters used in the URLs are:
Characters Symbols
– Asterisks *
– Dollar signs $
– Exclamation mark !
– Hyphens –
– Left/right parentheses ()
– Periods .
– Plus signs +
– Single quotation marks ‘
– Underscores _
– Front/back slashes / \
– Percentage %
| Character | Code Points (Hexadecimal) | Code Points (Decimal) | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Space | 20 | 32 | Significant sequences of spaces may be lost in some uses (especially multiple spaces) |
| Quotation Marks | 22 | 34 | These characters are often used to delimit URLs in plain text. |
| ‘Less Than’ symbol (“<“) | 3C | 60 | |
| ‘Greater Than’ symbol (“>”) | 3E | 62 | |
| ‘Pound’ Character (“#”) | 23 | 35 | This is used in URLs to indicate where a fragment identifier (bookmarks/anchors in HTML) begins. |
| Percent Character (“%”) | 25 | 37 | This is used in URLs to encode/escape other characters. It should also be encoded. |
| Miscellaneous Characters | Some systems can possibly modify these characters. | ||
| Left Curly Brace (“{“) | 7B | 123 | |
| Right Curly Brace (“}”) | 7D | 125 | |
| Vertical Bar/Pipe (“|”) | 7C | 124 | |
| Backslash (“\”) | 5C | 92 | |
| Caret (“^”) | 5E | 94 | |
| Tilde (“~”) | 7E | 126 | |
| Left Square Bracket (“[“) | 5B | 91 | |
| Right Square Bracket (“]”) | 5D | 93 | |
| Grave Accent (“`”) | 60 | 96 | |
