Why browsers encode url in this form?

Question

Why browsers encode url in this form ?

From:

http://www.example.com 

to:

http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com

Answer 1

URLs can only be sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set.

Since URLs often contains characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted. URL encoding converts the URL into a valid ASCII format.

URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits corresponding to the character values in the ISO-8859-1 character-set.

URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a + sign.

You can read more here:

INTRODUCTION TO URL ENCODING / URL ENCODED STRINGS