Does a `+` in a URL scheme/host/path represent a space?

Space characters may only be encoded as "+" in one context: application/x-www-form-urlencoded key-value pairs.

The RFC-1866 (HTML 2.0 specification), paragraph 8.2.1, subparagraph 1 says: "The form field names and values are escaped: space characters are replaced by "+", and then reserved characters are escaped").

Here is an example of such a string in URL where RFC-1866 allows encoding spaces as pluses: "http://example.com/over/there?name=foo+bar". So, only after "?", can spaces be replaced by pluses (in other cases, spaces should be encoded to "%20"). This way of encoding form data is also given in later HTML specifications, for example, look for relevant paragraphs about application/x-www-form-urlencoded in HTML 4.01 Specification, and so on.

But, because it's hard to always correctly determine the context, it's the best practice to never encode spaces as "+". It's better to percent-encode all characters except "unreserved" defined in RFC-3986, p.2.3. Here is a code example that illustrates what should be encoded. It is given in Delphi (pascal) programming language, but it is very easy to understand how it works for any programmer regardless of the language possessed:

(* percent-encode all unreserved characters as defined in RFC-3986, p.2.3 *)
function UrlEncodeRfcA(const S: AnsiString): AnsiString;
const    
  HexCharArrA: array [0..15] of AnsiChar = '0123456789ABCDEF';
var
  I: Integer;
  c: AnsiChar;
begin
 // percent-encoding, see RFC-3986, p. 2.1
  Result := S;
  for I := Length(S) downto 1 do
  begin
    c := S[I];
    case c of
      'A' .. 'Z', 'a' .. 'z', // alpha
      '0' .. '9',             // digit
      '-', '.', '_', '~':;    // rest of unreserved characters as defined in the RFC-3986, p.2.3
      else
        begin
          Result[I] := '%';
          Insert('00', Result, I + 1);
          Result[I + 1] := HexCharArrA[(Byte(C) shr 4) and $F)];
          Result[I + 2] := HexCharArrA[Byte(C) and $F];
        end;
    end;
  end;
end;

function UrlEncodeRfcW(const S: UnicodeString): AnsiString;
begin
  Result := UrlEncodeRfcA(Utf8Encode(S));
end;

• Percent encoding in the path section of a URL is expected to be decoded, but
• any + characters in the path component is expected to be treated literally.

To be explicit: + is only a special character in the query component.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986

You can find a nice list of corresponding URL encoded characters on W3Schools.

• + becomes %2B
• space becomes %20