encode and decode strings into and from application/x-www-form-urlencoded

The application/x-www-form-urlencoded format encodes a ordered data sets of
pairs consisting of a name and a value, with pairs separated by ampersand or
semicolon and names and values separated by the equal sign. Space characters
are replaced with plus sign and any characters not in the unreserved character
set is encoded using the percent-encoding scheme also used for resource
identifiers.
A percent-encoded octet is encoded as a character triplet, consisting of the
percent character "%" followed by the two hexadecimal digits representing that
octet's numeric value.