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Some characters cannot be part of a URL (for example, the space) and some other characters have a special meaning in a URL. In HTML forms, the character = is used to separate a name from a value. The URI generic syntax uses URL encoding to deal with this problem, while HTML forms make some additional substitutions rather than applying percent encoding for all such characters.
For example, spaces in a string are either encoded with %20 or replaced with the plus sign (+). If you use a pipe character (|) as a separator, be sure to encode the pipe as %7C. A comma in a string should be encoded as %2C.
It is recommended you use your platform's normal URL building libraries to automatically encode your URLs, to ensure the URLs are properly escaped for your platform.
Building a valid URLYou may think that a "valid" URL is self-evident, but that's not quite the case. A URL entered within an address bar in a browser, for example, may contain special characters (e.g. "上海+中國"); the browser needs to internally translate those characters into a different encoding before transmission. By the same token, any code that generates or accepts UTF-8 input might treat URLs with UTF-8 characters as "valid", but would also need to translate those characters before sending them out to a web server. This process is called URL-encoding or percent-encoding.
We need to translate special characters because all URLs need to conform to the syntax specified by the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) specification. In effect, this means that URLs must contain only a special subset of ASCII characters: the familiar alphanumeric symbols, and some reserved characters for use as control characters within URLs. This table summarizes these characters:
Summary of Valid URL Characters Set characters URL usage Alphanumeric a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Text strings, scheme usage (http), port (8080), etc. Unreserved - _ . ~ Text strings Reserved ! * ' ( ) ; : @ & = + $ , / ? % # [ ] Control characters and/or Text Strings
When building a valid URL, you must ensure that it contains only those characters shown in the table. Conforming a URL to use this set of characters generally leads to two issues, one of omission and one of substitution:
上海+中國 need to be encoded using the above characters. By popular convention, spaces (which are not allowed within URLs) are often represented using the plus '+' character as well.? is used within URLs to indicate the beginning of the query string; if you wish to use the string "? and the Mysterions," you'd need to encode the '?' character.All characters to be URL-encoded are encoded using a '%' character and a two-character hex value corresponding to their UTF-8 character. For example, 上海+中國 in UTF-8 would be URL-encoded as %E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%2B%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B. The string ? and the Mysterians would be URL-encoded as %3F+and+the+Mysterians or %3F%20and%20the%20Mysterians.
Some common characters that must be encoded are:
Unsafe character Encoded value Space%20 " %22 < %3C > %3E # %23 % %25 | %7C
Converting a URL that you receive from user input is sometimes tricky. For example, a user may enter an address as "5th&Main St." Generally, you should construct your URL from its parts, treating any user input as literal characters.
Additionally, URLs are limited to 16384 characters for all Google Maps Platform web services and static web APIs. For most services, this character limit will seldom be approached. However, note that certain services have several parameters that may result in long URLs.
Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-07-02 UTC.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-07-02 UTC."],[[["URLs can only contain a specific set of ASCII characters and some reserved characters, requiring encoding of other characters."],["URL encoding involves replacing unsafe characters with a '%' followed by their two-digit hexadecimal UTF-8 representation."],["Characters like spaces, quotation marks, less than, greater than, hash, percent, and pipe often require URL encoding."],["Building URLs programmatically using platform libraries is recommended for automatic and proper encoding."],["Google Maps Platform web services and static web APIs have a URL character limit of 16384."]]],["URLs require encoding because they only accept a specific subset of ASCII characters. Special characters, like spaces and foreign language characters, must be encoded using percent encoding (e.g., `%20` for space) or plus signs in specific instances. Reserved characters, such as `=`, `?`, and `|`, also need encoding when used literally, not as control characters. It's best to utilize platform URL building libraries for automatic encoding, guaranteeing proper escaping, because it can be complex to do manually. It is also important to note that URLs are limited to 16384 characters for Google Maps Platform web services.\n"]]
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