Url Encoding Explained

Why do I need URL encoding?
The URL specification RFC 1738 specifies that only a small set of characters can be used in a URL. Those characters are:

A to Z (ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ)
a to z (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz)
0 to 9 (0123456789)
$ (Dollar Sign)
- (Hyphen / Dash)
_ (Underscore)
. (Period)
+ (Plus sign)
! (Exclamation / Bang)
* (Asterisk / Star)
' (Single Quote)
( (Open Bracket)
) (Closing Bracket)
How does URL encoding work?
All offending characters are replaced by a % and a two digit hexadecimal value that represents the character in the proper ISO character set. Here are a couple of examples:

$ (Dollar Sign) becomes %24
& (Ampersand) becomes %26
+ (Plus) becomes %2B
, (Comma) becomes %2C
: (Colon) becomes %3A
; (Semi-Colon) becomes %3B
= (Equals) becomes %3D
? (Question Mark) becomes %3F
@ (Commercial A / At) becomes %40