browsers translate characters?

I hope this is not a silly question.

I've been working on a CGI script (in C) and discovered that
forward slashes put into a text field on a form get received
at the server as the string "%2F".  (And that tildes (~) are
received as "%7E" and colons as "%3A".)

Is this so that these characters can be interpreted by the
server for the particular OS they are running on?  For example,
forward slashes would be translated into backslashes on an NT
server? or what?

Am I correct that the browsers are doing this conversion?  I think
I am since that is what arrived in my stdin.  Why should browsers
do this instead of servers?

-Rick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Rick Stout
(rick@cts.com)

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 1995 19:37:53 UTC