URL Encoding on HTML Form Data - Firefox

This section provides a tutorial example on how Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0 is applying URL encoding on HTML form input data. Firefox uses application/x-www-form-urlencoded encoding.

In this tutorial, I want you to try the same HTML page described in the previous tutorial with Firefox.

If you open URL_Encoding_Form_Test.html with Firefox 3.5, you will get similar result as IE 7.0:
URL Encoding on Form Data - Firefox

If you repeat the same test described in the previous section with Firefox 3.5, you will get similar result as IE 7.0:
URL Encoding on Form Data - Firefox

If look at the page request URL field on the browser, you will see that the input string "和荣, how a u?" is showing up as "和荣%2C+how+a+u%3F". Two Chinese characters are showing as is without any coding.

This is because Firefox is smart. It automatically decoded "%E5%92%8C" and "%E8%8D%A3" as two unicode characters and display them correctly in the URL field.

Conclusion:

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Base64 Encoding

 Base64 Encoding and Decoding Tools

 Base64URL - URL Safe Base64 Encoding

 Base32 Encoding

URL Encoding, URI Encoding, or Percent Encoding

 What Is URL/URI Encoding?

 URL Encoding Variations

 URL Encoding on HTML Form Data - IE

URL Encoding on HTML Form Data - Firefox

 application/x-www-form-urlencoded Encoding in Java

 URI String and Components in Java

 URL Encoding Support in PHP

 UUEncode Encoding

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB