Special characters in a URL or XML document

special characters in the URL In a query executed on a URL, a special character is specified as %xx, where xx is the hexadecimal value of the character. The following table lists these special characters and describes their meanings. For more information, see the RFC1738 specification in http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html.

Special characters Special meaning Hexadecimal value + Represents a space (you cannot use a space in a URL). %2b / Separate directories and subdirectories. %2f ? Separates the actual URLs and parameters. %3f % Specifies a special character. %25 # Represents a bookmark. %23 & The separator between the parameters specified in the URL. %26 For example, examine the following query: Because the character has a special meaning in the URL (separating the URL and the passed arguments), the character is encoded as %3fwhen the query is specified in the URL. The following URL will execute the query. The parameter value is passed in the URL. The browser escapes all special characters (such as + characters) on the right side (that is, converts the + character on the right side to %20). special characters in XML Characters such as > and < are XML markup characters that have special meanings in XML. When you specify these characters in an SQL query (or XPath query), They must be encoded appropriately (also known as entity encodings). The following table lists these special characters and describes their meanings. For more information, see The XML 1.0 specification in the XML 1.0 specification. special characters /td> special meaning entity encoding > the Start tag. &gt; The , . &lt; " " quotes. &quot; ' ' Apostrophes. &apos; and "&" characters. &amp; For example, examine the following query: Because the < character has a special meaning in XML, you must encode the character as &gt;when you specify the query in a template (an XML document). The following is the template that contains the query: Entity encoding in URL encoding Sometimes you may need to specify both the URL encoding and the entity encoding. For example, you can specify the following template directly in the URL (instead of specifying a filename): In this example, the & character in the entity encoding &lt; (specified for < tag characters) has a special meaning in the URL, which needs to be further Coding. The & character must be encoded as a %26, otherwise it will be treated as a parameter separator in the URL. The URL is then specified as: