[wplug] URL control codes?

[Alexandros Papadopoulos]

On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:00, Zach wrote:
> Some URLs I see have weird control characters in them such as:
>
> %7E
> %5F
>
> Does anyone know of an RFC or something that will tell me what each
> control code means? Such as [space], [/], etc..

It's a rather complex issue it seems.

You may start reading up on it from wikipedia, the usual source of 
knowledge :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding

These articles point to (among RFCs and other good stuff) to this 
practical table: http://i-technica.com/whitestuff/urlencodechart.html

> Also is there a way to force a browser (such as Firefox) to not use
> these control codes?

I assume the answer is no. Why would you want to do that?

> I was looking through my bookmarks and these codes are everywhere!

That's perfectly normal. Otherwise URLs and therefore all online objects 
would be limited to a strict ASCII-only character set, without any 
special characters like spaces, commas and the like. We wouldn't want 
that to happen.

Cheers

-A