What is the difference between encodeURI and encodeURIComponent?

URL Percent-Encoding & Decoding Tool

Encode special characters into percent-encoded URL formats or decode encoded URI strings.

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URI Percent-Encoding Standards (RFC 3986)

Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) are restricted to a specific US-ASCII character set. Percent-encoding allows arbitrary characters and query parameters to be transmitted safely over HTTP without breaking URL parsing rules.

Reserved vs. Unreserved Characters

Unreserved Characters: Letters (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), and characters -, _, ., ~ never require percent-encoding.
Reserved Characters: Characters with syntactic meaning in URLs (e.g. ?, &, =, /, :, #). When passed as parameter values, they must be percent-encoded (e.g., spaces become %20, and & becomes %26).

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

encodeURI preserves protocol and host delimiters (like http://), whereas encodeURIComponent encodes all reserved characters for query parameter values.

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