in reply to How to pass paramaters to script without it haulting on :

RFC3986 Defines the URI syntax, and identifies "reserved characters" - i.e. those NOT PERMITTED in the querystring as:
reserved = gen-delims / sub-delims gen-delims = ":" / "/" / "?" / "#" / "[" / "]" / "@" sub-delims = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")" / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "="
So - you cannot use ":" and "//" without escaping them.

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