Form Submission Encoding

Form submission encoding refers to the process of formatting and encoding form data before it is sent to the processing agent (such as a server). The encoding method depends on the content type specified in the form’s enctype attribute.

There are two main types of commonly used encoding:

• application/x-www-form-urlencoded

  • Simple format and it’s similar to what you see in the query parameters
  • It can be sent in get or post
  • Consists of pairs of keys and values separated by the & symbol
  • Can’t be used to send files

• multipart/form-data

  • More complex and covers all types of data that needs to be sent
  • Can be used to send files
  • The encoding separate between different values with a boundary
  • It can be used to upload multiple files using a Content-Type multipart/mixed and creates a separate boundary for it

Read more:

• W3 Official Documentation on Form submission