Keep spaces in URLs without encoding them

Question

As Stack Overflow seems to be unable to create links from URLs that have spaces in them, copy and paste this URL into your browser.

http://grooveshark.com/#!/search/song?q=we will rock you

It does not redirect you to ...song?q=we%20will%20rock%20you or anything like that. The spaces just simply stay there. When I first saw this, it looked so foreign to me. How is this achieved?

Answer 1

I believe they use javascript to set the contents of the url bar. You can use something like Live HTTP Headers to confirm that the browser definitely sends a request with %20 encoded spaces.

Answer 2

It’s a browser setting. The browser decodes the URL, to make it more readable for humans.

If you copy the URL from the browser’s address bar and paste it into a text document, you’ll see that the space characters are percent-encoded.

See How can I see how the browser percent-encoded my URL? (which is not visible on address bar)