List of valid characters for the fragment identifier in an URL?

Question

I'm using the fragment identifier to create a permalink for AJAX events in my web app similar to this guy. Something like:

http://www.myapp.com/calendar#filter:year/2010/month/5

I've done quite a bit of searching but can't find a list of valid characters for the fragment idenitifer. The W3C spec doesn't offer anything.

Do I need to encode the characters the same as the URL in has in general?

There doesn't seem to be any good information on this anywhere.

Answer 1

See the RFC 3986.

fragment    = *( pchar / "/" / "?" )
pchar         = unreserved / pct-encoded / sub-delims / ":" / "@"    
unreserved    = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." / "_" / "~"
pct-encoded   = "%" HEXDIG HEXDIG
sub-delims    = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")"
                 / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "="

So you can use !, $, &, ', (, ), *, +, ,, ;, =, something matching %[0-9a-fA-F]{2}, something matching [a-zA-Z0-9], -, ., _, ~, :, @, /, and ?

Answer 2

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.5:

fragment    = *( pchar / "/" / "?" )

and

pchar         = unreserved / pct-encoded / sub-delims / ":" / "@"
unreserved    = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." / "_" / "~"
sub-delims    = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")"
              / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "="
pct-encoded   = "%" HEXDIG HEXDIG

So, combined, the fragment cannot contain #, a raw %, ^, [, ], {, }, \, ", < and > according to the RFC.