A definitive guide to Url Encoding in ASP .NET

Question

I am starting to realise that there are about a bazillion different methods for encoding urls in .NET. I keep finding new ones. They all work slightly differently, but they all have essentially the same summary comments.

Does anyone have a definitive matrix that shows the exact differences between the following methods:

HttpUtility.UrlEncode
HttpUtility.UrlPathEncode
Server.UrlEncode
Uri.EscapeUriString
Uri.EscapeDataString

... are they any more?

Also it would be good to match these up with use-cases e.g.:

• Urls in href attributes of a tags
• Urls to be displayed to the user in HTML
• Urls as querystring values (i.e. to be sent in GET requests)
• Urls to be sent in POST requests etc

Answer 1

This blog post has a listing of specific character differences.