Is the unencoded equals character (=) allowed as the value of a querystring?

Lets say i have the following URL:

http://www.foo.com?key1=bar&key2=ba开发者_C百科z=egg

Between "baz" and "egg" is an equals. Does "baz=egg" count as value for key2 or has = to be encoded?

Thanks

It may depend on your server configuration, so maybe its a good idea to encode it, but certainly on my server the value of key2 in the above example is 'baz=egg' and so encoding is not needed.