Can anyone explain what this string means?

Question

Can anyone help me explain what this string means?

KeyWord=%EC%E5%EB%E8%F1%F1%E0

I want to understand what is this? Is it hexadecimal or this string is encrypted by some keys?

Answer 1

This is a percent-encoded string.

The decoded version of the string is ìåëèññà.

Each character of the string has a percent-encoded representation, so the first character ì is encoded to %EC, and so on.

The percent-encoding of a string can be different depending on the character set of the string. In this case, the string is in ISO-8859-1, where ì is represented as 0xEC, hence the percent-encoding %EC. However, in UTF-8 it is represented as 0xC3 0xAC, so the percent-encoded version of the UTF-8 string would start with %C3%AC.