URIs must be properly escaped?

Will one (or more) of you webmaster geniuses please explain what "URIs must be properly escaped" means?..or at least refer me to an appropriate resource?

This probably is something very basic but I am unable to find the answer in my HTML book right now. This is one of those late night quandaries keeping me up even later trying to solve the mystery while I am cross-eyed from looking at code. :notsure:

Serious and the not-so-serious replies will be appreciated.

Hi willwest,

I couldn't really explain the answer so I've decided to quote from the most simple example I could find -- hope it helps.

"To be able to parse an URL safely it is sometimes necessary to "escape" certain characters, to hide them from the parser. An escaped character is encoded as a character triplet, consisting of the percent character "%" followed by the two hexadecimal digits representing the octet code. For example, "%20" is the escaped encoding for the US-ASCII space character."

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netl...o_url.html#esc

Thank you Robin for the helpful info.

Your welcome. :)