Customizing the Operations Console Menu › How to Customize the Operations Console Menu › Specify an Action to Perform › Launch a Browser › Characters in URLs

Characters in URLs

This section discusses the characters to use or avoid in URLs.

Standard Characters

The URL formatting must adhere to the standards published in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RFC 1738. Use of non-standard characters in URLs results in unreliable browser performance including the browser not locating the specified web page.

Spaces and Commas

If you use spaces or commas, convert them to their ASCII equivalent. URL encoding consists of a percent (%) symbol followed by the two-digit hexadecimal representation (case-insensitive) of the ISO-Latin code point for the character.

• For spaces, use %20
• For commas, use %2C

Note: Some browsers encounter problems processing URLs even with this encoding.

Ampersands

If you use ampersands, convert them to &amp.

CDATA

You can put URLs inside a CDATA section so that they are not parsed, which avoids possible problems with URLs and the XML parser.

Comply with the CDATA requirements, including the following:

• A CDATA section cannot contain the string "]]>"; therefore, nested CDATA sections are not allowed.
• Use no spaces or line breaks inside the "]]>" string.

Unsafe Characters

The following table lists characters that are easily misinterpreted in URLs. Always substitute these characters with % followed by the hexadecimal code points listed in the table. For example, use %20 to represent a space in a URL.

Reserved Characters

The following table lists characters that have special uses in URLs. Substitute such characters with % followed by the hexadecimal code points listed in the table when they are used as regular text and not in their special role. For example, use %24 to represent a plain-text dollar sign ($) in a URL.