URL prefixes such as http:// and https:// are ignored for URL format validation and are not stored as part of the URL in the system.

The URL domain prefix www is included when performing both URL validation and storage. Note that www is not a mandatory prefix to a full domain. Many forms of full domain are valid, such as:

yellow.company.com
www.company.com/yellow
my.company.com/yellow

The format validation for URLs is limited to checking if the URL either begins with a / (forward slash) or else contains a . (dot) before the last character. If a URL fails this limited format validation, the system will return an error message and the administrator will not be allowed to save the URL.

Encoding URL Special Characters

When URLs that have been recorded in Site Administration and stored in the repository are used for generating links, problems may occur if these URLs contain special characters. As such, URL special characters should be replaced by their corresponding hexadecimal equivalent code. For example, the URL www.example.com/this & that/pages/10%off.jsp should be entered as www.example.com/this%20&%20that/pages/10%25off.jsp where the spaces have been encoded to %20 and the percentage symbol has been encoded to %25.

Note: With the exception of Internationalized Domain Name in Application (IDNA) encoding, Site Administration will not automatically encode URLs that contain special characters. This avoids any possibility of re-encoding URLs that have already been entered by the user. It is assumed that all URL fields are populated in an encoded format.