# Bad value X for attribute “href” on element “link”: Illegal character in path segment. Space is not allowed. > Canonical HTML version: https://rocketvalidator.com/html-validation/bad-value-x-for-attribute-href-on-element-link-illegal-character-in-path-segment-space-is-not-allowed > Attribution: Rocket Validator (https://rocketvalidator.com) > License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Spaces in the `href` attribute of a `` element are not valid URL characters and must be encoded as `%20`. URLs follow the syntax defined in [RFC 3986](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986), which does not allow literal space characters in any component of a URI. The `` element points to external resources such as stylesheets, icons, and preloaded files, and its `href` must be a valid URL. A browser often corrects the space on its own, but the markup is still invalid, so the validator flags it. To fix the issue, replace each space in the URL with `%20`, the percent-encoded form of the space character. If the resource genuinely lives at a path that contains spaces, the encoding is still required for the reference to be valid. This often appears with files whose names contain spaces, like an icon exported as `Capture 2026-06-23.webp`, or with folder names that include spaces. ## HTML examples ### Invalid: space in href ```html ``` ### Valid: spaces encoded as %20 ```html ``` If you control the file or directory names, renaming them to avoid spaces is a simpler long term fix. Use hyphens or underscores instead: ```html ```