: Do I really need to remove special characters in a URL? I have an FTP account shared with friends where we upload underground music albums and then we use the links to share the downloads

@Ogunnowo487

...share the downloads in a music forum


This is really just adding to the existing answers... the URL needs to be encoded at some point, either implicitly by the browser (or forum software) or explicitly by you.

You specifically mention you are sharing these links in a forum. Many forums automatically encode links in forum posts, so you might not have to explicitly encode this yourself - but this will depend on the forum.

Stack exchange (markdown) encodes links to a certain extent, but will fail on the unencoded spaces (as will a lot of forum software) if you simply type the unencoded URL into the post and allow the forum to auto-detect the URL. However, if the forum has a specific prompt for embedding links then it might cope with this OK, as it does when using the toolbar option on Stack Exchange:


NOTE TO EDITORS: Please don't "correct" the (broken) links below, or surround in <pre> tags
- the links are meant to be broken or viewed as-is; it is serving as an example!


Link typed manually

(As you can see, it is broken at the first space)

[link typed manually unencoded](http://www.example.com/downloads/Some Band - En français avec des caractères spéciaux (2013) [7'' EP].zip)

Link entered using the hyperlink option on the toolbar

link is correctly encoded by the forum software

The above link is encoded as:

<a href="http://www.example.com/downloads/Some%20Band%20-%20En%20fran%C3%A7ais%20avec%20des%20caract%C3%A8res%20sp%C3%A9ciaux%20%282013%29%20%5B7%27%27%20EP%5D.zip" rel="nofollow">link is correctly encoded by the <em>forum</em> software</a>

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@Heady270

Modern browsers will automatically encode the special characters in the URL before requesting it. So you are already using encoded characters, you just don't know it.

I used www.url-encode-decode.com/ to encode the file portion of your URL (using UTF-8):
www.mydomain.com/downloads/Some+Band+-+En+fran%C3%A7ais+avec+des+caract%C3%A8res+sp%C3%A9ciaux+%282013%29+%5B7%27%27+EP%5D.zip

That should be what browsers are sending when you link without the encoding. For compatibility with older browsers you should URL encode all your links.

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@Becky754

Yes, for uniform compatibility with different browsers and internet accessible applications, you would need to encode all of the following in a URL:


Spaces
ASCII Control characters
Non-ASCII characters
Reserved characters
Unsafe characters


For more information as to what these are, see this: What characters need to be encoded and why?

Since it seems that you know what the URL's are, you can try to use online URL encoders like the one in the link above, or in the following link, which also provides information about URL encoding: Url Encode/Decode online

Then test the URL's in as many browsers as possible to confirm they are working before shaing them. You can download several different browsers (e.g., Chrome, Firefox, and Opera) and install them on the same computer for testing.

As you become more familiar with which characters need to be encoded, you can replace or remove them in the names of your files prior to uploading.

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