Something I still don't understand when perfoming an http-get request to the server is what the advantage is in using JS fucntion encodeURIcomponent to encode each component of the http-get.

Doing some tests I saw the server (using PHP) gets the values of the http-get request properly also if I don't use encodeURIcomponent!!! Obviuosly I still need to encode at client level the special character & ? = / : otherwise an http-get value like this "peace&love=virtue" would be considered as new key value pair of the http-get request instead of a one single value. But why does encodeURIcompenent encodes also many other charcaters like 'è' for example wich is translated into %C3%A8 that must be decoded on a PHP server using the utf8_decode function.

By using encodeURIcomponent all values of the http-get request are utf8 encoded, therefor when getting them in PHP I have to call each time the utf8_decode function on each $_GET value which is quite annoying.

Why can't we just encode only the & ? = / : charcaters???

see also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2607946/js-encodeuricomponent-result-different-from-the-one-created-by-form It shows that encodeURIComponent does not even encode properly because a simple browser FORM GET encodes charactrs like '€', in different way. So I still wonder what does this encodeURIComponent is for?