When building a URL from query string parameters. When accepting an input that may have spaces. Examples const url = ''Ĭonsole.log(encodeURIComponent(url)) //https%3A%2F%2Fconst paramComponent = '?q=search'Ĭonsole.log(encodeURIComponent(paramComponent)) //'%3Fq%3Dsearch'Ĭonsole.log(url + encodeURIComponent(paramComponent)) // Here's a handy table of the difference in encoding of characters Which characters are encoded?ĮncodeURI() will not encode: will not encode: ~!*()'

What is the difference between encodeURI and encodeURIComponent?ĮncodeURI and encodeURIComponent are used to encode Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) by replacing certain characters by one, two, three or four escape sequences representing the UTF-8 encoding of the character.ĮncodeURIComponent should be used to encode a URI Component - a string that is supposed to be part of a URL.ĮncodeURI should be used to encode a URI or an existing URL. Need to accept query string parameters in order to make GET requests.User has submitted values in a form that may be in a string format and need to be passed in, such as URL fields.Special characters such as &, space, ! when entered in a url need to be escaped, otherwise they may cause unpredictable situations. This means that we need to encode these characters when passing into a URL. Reserved characters that do not belong to this set must be encoded. URLs can only have certain characters from the standard 128 character ASCII set. All URLs are URIs, but not all URIs are URLs. A URL specifies a resource and how it can be accessed (the protocol). URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier.Īnything that uniquely identifies a resource is its URI, such as id, name, or ISBN number. What is a URI and how is it different from a URL? In this article, I will demystify the difference between encodeURI and encodeURIComponent. And you might be confused which one to use and when.

You might think that encodeURI and encodeURIComponent do the same thing, at least from their names.

String url encode for javascript