Valid URL separators

Question

I have a long URL with several values.

Example 1:

http://www.domain.com/list?seach_type[]=0&search_period[]=1&search_min=3000&search_max=21000&search_area=6855%3B7470%3B7700%3B7730%3B7741%3B7742%3B7752%3B7755%3B7760%3B7770%3B7800%3B7840%3B7850%3B7860%3B7870%3B7884%3B7900%3B7950%3B7960%3B7970%3B7980%3B7990%3B8620%3B8643%3B8800%3B8830%3B8831%3B8832%3B8840%3B8850%3B8860%3B8881%3B9620%3B9631%3B9632

My variable search area contains only 4 number digits (example 4000, 5000), but can contain a lot of them. Right now I seperate these in the URL by using ; as separator symbol. Though as seen in Example 1, the ; is converted into %3B. This makes me believe that this is a bad symbol to use.

What is the best URL separator?

FYI, this is a good URL encoding/decoding tool for testing: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ — Jon Onstott, Jun 24 '13 at 16:49

score 43 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 05 '10 at 21:14

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Moontear, I think you have misread the linked document. That limitation only applies to the "scheme" portion of the URL. In the case of WWW URLs, that is the "http".

The next section of the document goes on to say:

Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.

I'd personally use comma (,). However, plus (+) and dash (-) are both reasonable options as well.

BTW, that document also mentions that semi-colon (;) is reserved in some schemes.

answered Oct 05 '10 at 21:14

GinoA

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@You: I disagree with the downvote. It's not just a comment, but also a valid answer, more explicit than mine. Especially the last two paragraphs. – Arseni Mourzenko Oct 05 '10 at 23:12
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@MainMa: Somewhat true. I'd rephrase it if I were GinoA; as it is now, it's a reply — and those belong in comments. – You Oct 06 '10 at 01:20
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Chrome escapes ' character as %27 in address bar. – vladimir83 Oct 08 '18 at 08:12

Dennis G · Accepted Answer · 2023-03-30T06:28:21.817

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Well, according to RFC1738, valid URLs may only contain the letters a-z, the plus sign (+), period and hyphen (-).

Generally I would go with a plus to separate your search areas. So your URL would become http://www.example.com/list?seach_type=0&search_period=1&search_min=3000&search_max=21000&search_area=6855+7470+7700+...

--EDIT--

As GinoA pointed out I misread the document. Hence "$-_.+!*'()," are valid characters too in an unencoded URL. I'd still go with the + sign though.

edited Mar 30 '23 at 06:28

answered Oct 05 '10 at 20:36

Dennis G

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Not sure what you mean by "valid" here. `%20` is used to **URL encode** a space – OneCricketeer Mar 29 '23 at 04:33
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You reply to an answer from 2010? How did you find this :-) I have added the **unencoded** part that was missing. – Dennis G Mar 30 '23 at 06:28

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 05 '10 at 20:33

If there are only numbers to separate, you have a large choice of separators. You can choose any letter for example.

Probably a space can be a good choice. It will be transformed into + character in the URL, so will be more readable than a letter.

Example: search_area=4000+5000+6000

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 29 '17 at 18:31

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I'm very late to the party, but a valid query string can repeat variables so instead of...

http://x.y.z/list?type=0&period=1&min=3000&max=21000&area=6855+7470+7700

...you could also use...

http://x.y.z/list?type=0&period=1&min=3000&max=21000&area=6855&area=7470&area=7700

answered Sep 29 '17 at 18:31

dacracot

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And most of the web frameworks handle this out of the box, the search area elements get parsed as a list automatically. – viam0Zah Jun 07 '21 at 13:25

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 07 '14 at 05:07

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"+" is to be interpreted as a space " " when the content-type is application/x-www-form-urlencoded (standard for HTML forms). This may be handled by your server software.

I prefer "!". It doesn't get URL encoded (at least not in Chrome) and it reserves "+" for use as a real space character in the typical case.

answered Aug 07 '14 at 05:07

rich remer

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Just wanted to point out (4.5 years after the fact) that Chrome (v70.0.3538.77 (Official Build) (64-bit) at least) now encodes `!` to `%21` – Kingsley Jan 02 '19 at 20:50
The ! after percent encoding becomes %21. I think the question did not include any client specific mechanism but encoding that maybe needs to be done in the delimiters. – Sakis Oct 08 '20 at 10:49

Valid URL separators

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