URL encoding stands for encoding certain characters in a URL by replacing them with one or more character triplets that consist of the percent character "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. The two hexadecimal digits of the triplet(s) represent the numeric value of the replaced character.
The term URL encoding is a bit inexact because the encoding procedure is not limited to URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), but can also be applied to any other URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) such as URNs (Uniform Resource Names). Therefore, the term percent-encoding should be preferred.