You have encountered a string that is not a word, not a standard code, and not a live link. It is, in fact, a —a fragment of a URL that has been partially encoded, partially truncated, and stripped of its context.
Notice there are before the 3A and 2F . This is the first sign of corruption. The original data likely looked like this: proxy-url-file-3A-2F-2F-2F
No, this is not a virus. It is a broken URL fragment. Fix the encoder, fix the logger, or remove the hyphens. Your system will heal. You have encountered a string that is not
proxy-url-file%3A%2F%2F%2F
When decoded, that becomes: proxy-url-file:/// Now we have something recognizable: proxy-url-file:/// This is the first sign of corruption
This article dissects proxy-url-file-3A-2F-2F-2F . We will decode it, explain why it exists, explore the technical disasters that create it, and tell you how to fix the underlying problem. To understand the fragment, we must first decode it. The string contains 3A and 2F , which are hexadecimal byte values in Percent-Encoding (also known as URL encoding).