URL Encode

The URL-ENCODE directive encodes a string to the application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME format.

Syntax

url-encode <column>

The <column> contains a URL to be encoded.

When encoding a string, these rules apply:

The alphanumeric characters a through z, A through Z, and 0 through 9 remain unchanged
The special characters ., -, *, and _ remain unchanged
The space character is converted into a plus sign (+)
All other characters are considered unsafe and are first converted into one or more bytes using an encoding scheme. Each byte is then represented by a 3-character string %xy, where xy is the two-digit hexadecimal representation of the byte. The recommended encoding scheme to use is UTF-8. However, for compatibility reasons, if an encoding is not specified, then the default encoding of the platform is used.

Note: Uses UTF-8 as the encoding scheme for the string.