Spacing Encoding

Each search engine profile you created has this information: space encoding. The space encoding is the representation for blank space characters in the URL. When you search with QueryDial’s popup or in the address bar, the app needs to generate a new search URL based on the search engine you choose to use, the search term you entered also needs to be encoded to be used in the URL.

Standard URLs can only understand a limited character set. Spaces throw a wrench in things because they aren’t part of this set. URL encoding tackles this issue by converting spaces into a format that URLs can understand. QueryDial automatically encodes other characters for you, but lets you choose the space encoding. This is because the practice of encoding spaces varies in different websites, and when you used a wrong space encoding the website may not be able to interpret it correctly.

Most websites encode spaces using “%20” or ”+“. To find out the space encoding used by a search engine/website, You can try searching a term with spaces (e.g. john doe) then observe how those spaces are being represented in the query URL.