enctype HTML attribute

Dec 11, 2013, by admin

The enctype attribute’s main purpose is to indicate how the form data/values should be encoded prior to it being sent to the location defined in the action attribute on the form.

By default, form data is encoded to “application/x-www-form-urlencoded” so that spaces are converted to “+” symbols,and special characters like apostrophes, percentage and other symbols are converted to their ASCII HEX equivalent values.
The form’s enctype attribute is supported almost in all browsers.

The enctype attribute is supported only if method=”post” is used.

Other options of enctype attibute are.

• application/x-www-form-urlencoded
  Default value.All characters are encoded before sent to server(spaces are converted to “+” symbol and special characters are converted to ASCII HEX values)

• multipart/form-data
  No characters are encoded.
  This value “multipart/form-data” should be used for submitting forms that contain files, non-ASCII data, and binary data.

• text/plain
  Spaces are converted to “+” symbol but special characters are not encoded.