How to make working URL links when they have parentheses and special characters

Last edited Sat Oct 4, 2025, 05:03 PM - Edit history (1)

Here's a typical link that doesn't work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(Always_Be_My)_Sunshine

To get links like that to work, you need to substitute the parentheses and other characters that sometimes appear such as hash marks. It's a bit technical, but you look up "ascii parenthesis" and choose the unicode or hex value. Here's a good link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

In particular, substitute %28 for ( and %29 for ).

There ASCII URL encoders and decoders, but they tend to encode colons and sometimes the slashes so they don't work too well.

https://www.url-encode-decode.com/ produces:
https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F%28Always_Be_My%29_Sunshine

https://ascii.cl/url-encoding.htm produces:
https%3A//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%28Always_Be_My%29_Sunshine

You might use them and maybe save a little time or trouble by just replacing the %3A with the colon, which is easy to remember since it is near the front and we've seen thousands of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%28Always_Be_My%29_Sunshine