URL's and plus signs

Question

I am aware that a + in the query string of a URL represents a space. Is this also the case outside of the query string region? That is to say, does the following URL:

http://a.com/a+b/c

actually represent:

http://a.com/a b/c

(and thus need to be encoded if it should actually be a +), or does it in fact actually represent a+b/c ?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Thou shalt always encode URLs.

Here is how Ruby encodes your URL:

irb(main):008:0> CGI.escape "a.com/a+b"
=> "a.com%2Fa%2Bb"

Answer 2

You can find a nice list of corresponding URL encoded characters on W3Schools.

• + becomes %2B
• space becomes %20

Answer 3

• Percent encoding in the path section of a URL is expected to be decoded, but
• any + characters in the path component is expected to be treated literally.

To be explicit: + is only a special character in the query component.