A report on Form (HTML), POST (HTTP) and Percent-encoding

It is often used when uploading a file or when submitting a completed web form.

As such, it is also used in the preparation of data of the media type, as is often used in the submission of HTML form data in HTTP requests.

Percent-encoding of reserved characters in URLs and query strings can significantly increase their length, and while Apache HTTP Server can handle up to 4,000 characters in a URL, Microsoft Internet Explorer is limited to 2,048 characters in any URL.

When data that has been entered into HTML forms is submitted, the names and values in the form elements are encoded and sent to the server in an HTTP request message using GET or POST.

The default MIME type (internet media type), application/x-www-form-urlencoded, is based on a very early version of the general URI percent-encoding rules, with a number of modifications such as newline normalization and replacing spaces with " " instead of " ".

When data that has been entered into HTML forms is submitted, the form field names and values are encoded and sent to the server in an HTTP request message using method GET or POST, or, historically, via email.