Why should you encode URLs?

Because some characters have special meanings.

For instance, in a query string, the ampersand (&) is used as a separator between key-value pairs. If you were to put an ampersand into one of those values, it would look like the separator between the end of a value and the beginning of the next key. So for special characters like this, we use percent encoding so that we can be sure that the data is unambiguously encoded.

There is a tool that you can use to encode URI's, see link below;

http://apidoc.vidispine.com/latest/_downloads/vsuri.html