How does the browser automatically convert spaces in links to %20 and why is it important to understand this behavior in PHP?

When a link contains spaces, the browser automatically converts them to "%20" to adhere to URL encoding standards. This behavior is important to understand in PHP because when processing URLs with spaces, we need to properly handle them by decoding the "%20" back to spaces using the `urldecode()` function.

$url = "https://example.com/my%20page";
$decoded_url = urldecode($url);
echo $decoded_url; // Output: https://example.com/my page