Question

I have a restful webservice which receives some structured data which is put straight into a database.

The data is send from an OS using wget. I am just wondering whether I actually need to URL encode the data and if so why? Please note that it is no problem to do it but it might be uneccessary in this scenario.

Answer 1

If your data has characters that aren’t allowed in urls, you should url encode it.

The following characters are either reserved (like &) or just present the possibility of confusing code. If your data contains these characters, urlencode it. Remember if you are using any extended ascii characters, unicode characters or non-printable characters you should url-encode your data.

• Dollar (“$”)
• Ampersand (“&”)
• Plus (“+”)
• Comma (“,”)
• Forward slash/Virgule (“/”)
• Colon (“:”)
• Semi-colon (“;”)
• Equals (“=”)
• Question mark (“?”)
• ‘At’ symbol (“@”)
• Space
• Quotation marks
• ‘Less Than’ symbol (“<“)
• ‘Greater Than’ symbol (“>”)
• ‘Pound’ character (“#”)
• Percent character (“%”)
• Left Curly Brace (“{“)
• Right Curly Brace (“}”)
• Vertical Bar/Pipe (“|”)
• Backslash (“\”)
• Caret (“^”)
• Tilde (“~”)
• Left Square Bracket (“[“)
• Right Square Bracket (“]”)
• Grave Accent (“`”)

More info can be found here: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm