Working with Curl to do get requests

This is one of those strange things that I could not find on the internet as hard as I tried to look.

I am working with curl to do some get requests to twitter and google and would like to know if curl has a way of simply encoding my strings to be 开发者_高级运维url safe? If curl does not encode urls for me can some one point me to a regex script for encoding urls?

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A program wget will encode an url including space or punctuations.

$ wget 'http://www.example.com/123 456'
--2011-06-28 15:46:02--  http://www.example.com/123%20456
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