What's the big difference between uppercase and lowercase urls

[Abyzals]

Hi all,

Can someone really explain to me what the big difference is between uppercase url's and lowercase urls.

 

[IM-Rafi]

Looks different?

 

[daigovo]

The domain part is not case-sensitive. GoOgLe.CoM works. You can add uppercase as you like, but normally there's not a reason to do so and, as stated in the comments below, may hurt your SEO ranking.

The path part is or is not case sensitive, depending on the server environment and server. Typically Windows machines are case insensitive, while Linux machines are case sensitive. This means that you should stick to lowercase or you risk introducing a bug that's really hard to hunt down (mismatched case that doesn't matter on the dev server).

The query string part is available to the server as it is. You can readily use mixed-case as you like, or discard the case (toLowerCase(...)). This also means that using a base64-encoded key will work. You can't expect the users to type that correctly, though.

The hash part (called "fragment identifier") is only available to the client code, not to the server. Javascript may distinguish between the cases as it likes, and so does the browser. url#a will scroll to the element with the ID a, but url#A won't.

 

[Dopious]

There is no difference, fckme.url goes to the same website as FckMe.Url

 

[moosicles]

AFAIK, urls are case sensitive after the domain name. However, most webservers seem to redirect to lowercase versions of the url. Perhaps it is doing a case insensitive text match if it fails case sensitive searches

 

[Kenobii]

There is no difference

 

[code API]

The domain part is not case-sensitive. GoOgLe.CoM works. You can add uppercase as you like, but normally there's not a reason to do so and, as stated in the comments below, may hurt your SEO ranking.

The path part is or is not case sensitive, depending on the server environment and server. Typically Windows machines are case insensitive, while Linux machines are case sensitive. This means that you should stick to lowercase or you risk introducing a bug that's really hard to hunt down (mismatched case that doesn't matter on the dev server).

The query string part is available to the server as it is. You can readily use mixed-case as you like, or discard the case (toLowerCase(...)). This also means that using a base64-encoded key will work. You can't expect the users to type that correctly, though.

The hash part (called "fragment identifier") is only available to the client code, not to the server. Javascript may distinguish between the cases as it likes, and so does the browser. url#a will scroll to the element with the ID a, but url#A won't.

This is absolutely correct.

I tried it myself. The path part returned a 404 error page when I mistakenly entered an article URL as uppercase. Whereas, it was correct when entered as lower case. Ever since then, I always stick with the usage of lower case for better user experience.

This is something I just learned about 2 weeks ago.

 

[TitanTopRank]

An Internet address is only case sensitive for everything after the domain name. For example, it does not matter if you use uppercase or lowercase with "computerhope.com," it still reaches the same page. However, when typing the name of the page, file, or directory in the URL, it is case sensitive