URL - Uniform Resource Locator

Web browsers request pages from web servers by using a URL.

A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is used to address a document (or other data) on the web.

A URL can be composed of words (e.g. w3schools.com), or an Internet Protocol (IP) address (e.g. 192.68.20.50).

A web address like https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp follows these syntax rules:

scheme://prefix.domain:port/path/filename

Explanation:

scheme - defines the type of Internet service (most common is http or https)

prefix - defines a domain prefix (default for http is www)

domain - defines the Internet domain name (like w3schools.com)

port - defines the port number at the host (default for http is 80)

path - defines a path at the server (If omitted: the root directory of the site)

filename - defines the name of a document or resource

Common URL Schemes

The table below lists some common schemes:

URL Encoding

URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. If a URL contains characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted.

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

URL encoding replaces non-ASCII characters with a "%" followed by hexadecimal digits.

URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a plus (+) sign, or %20.

Try It Yourself

If you click "Submit", 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.

ASCII Encoding Examples

Your browser will encode input, according to the character-set used in your page.

The default character-set in HTML5 is UTF-8.