Unicode characters in URLs

In 2010, would you serve URLs containing UTF-8 characters in a large web portal?

Unicode characters are forbidden as per the RFC on URLs (see here). They would have to be percent encoded to be standards compliant.

My main point, though, is serving the unencoded characters for the sole purpose of having nice-looking URLs, so percent encoding is out.

All major browsers seem to be parsing those URLs okay no matter what the RFC says. My general impression, though, is that it gets very shaky when leaving the domain of web browsers:

• URLs getting copy+pasted into text files, E-Mails, even Web sites with a different encoding
• HTTP Client libraries
• Exotic browsers, RSS readers

Is my impression correct that trouble is to be expected here, and thus it's not a practical solution (yet) if you're serving a non-technical audience and it's important that all your links work properly even if quoted and passed on?

Is there some magic way of serving nice-looking URLs in HTML

http://www.example.com/düsseldorf?neighbourhood=Lörick

that can be copy+pasted with the special characters intact, but work correctly when re-used in older clients?

Use percent encoding. Modern browsers will take care of display & paste issues and make it human-readable. E. g. http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/위키백과:대문

Edit: when you copy such an url in Firefox, the clipboard will hold the percent-encoded form (which is usually a good thing), but if you copy only a part of it, it will remain unencoded.

What Tgr said. Background:

http://www.example.com/düsseldorf?neighbourhood=Lörick

That's not a URI. But it is an IRI.

You can't include an IRI in an HTML4 document; the type of attributes like href is defined as URI and not IRI. Some browsers will handle an IRI here anyway, but it's not really a good idea.

To encode an IRI into a URI, take the path and query parts, UTF-8-encode them then percent-encode the non-ASCII bytes:

http://www.example.com/d%C3%BCsseldorf?neighbourhood=L%C3%B6rick

If there are non-ASCII characters in the hostname part of the IRI, eg. http://例え.テスト/, they have be encoded using Punycode instead.

Now you have a URI. It's an ugly URI. But most browsers will hide that for you: copy and paste it into the address bar or follow it in a link and you'll see it displayed with the original Unicode characters. Wikipedia have been using this for years, eg.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ɸ

The one browser whose behaviour is unpredictable and doesn't always display the pretty IRI version is...

...well, you know.

Depending on your URL scheme, you can make the UTF-8 encoded part "not important". For example, if you look at Stack Overflow URLs, they're of the following form:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2742852/unicode-characters-in-urls</pre>

However, the server doesn't actually care if you get the part after the identifier wrong, so this also works:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2742852/これは、これを日本語のテキストです</pre>

So if you had a layout like this, then you could potentially use UTF-8 in the part after the identifier and it wouldn't really matter if it got garbled. Of course this probably only works in somewhat specialised circumstances...

Not sure if it is a good idea, but as mentioned in other comments and as I interpret it, many Unicode chars are valid in HTML5 URLs.

E.g., href docs say http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/links.html#attr-hyperlink-href:

> The href attribute on a and area elements must have a value that is a valid URL potentially surrounded by spaces.

Then the definition of "valid URL" points to http://url.spec.whatwg.org/, which defines URL code points as:

> ASCII alphanumeric, "!", "$", "&", "'", "(", ")", "*", "+", ",", "-", ".", "/", ":", ";", "=", "?", "@", "_", "~", and code points in the ranges U+00A0 to U+D7FF, U+E000 to U+FDCF, U+FDF0 to U+FFFD, U+10000 to U+1FFFD, U+20000 to U+2FFFD, U+30000 to U+3FFFD, U+40000 to U+4FFFD, U+50000 to U+5FFFD, U+60000 to U+6FFFD, U+70000 to U+7FFFD, U+80000 to U+8FFFD, U+90000 to U+9FFFD, U+A0000 to U+AFFFD, U+B0000 to U+BFFFD, U+C0000 to U+CFFFD, U+D0000 to U+DFFFD, U+E1000 to U+EFFFD, U+F0000 to U+FFFFD, U+100000 to U+10FFFD.

The term "URL code points" is then used in a few parts of the parsing algorithm, e.g. for the relative path state:

> If c is not a URL code point and not "%", parse error.

Also the validator http://validator.w3.org/ passes for URLs like "你好", and does not pass for URLs with characters like spaces "a b"

Related: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1547899/which-characters-make-a-url-invalid

As all of these comments are true, you should note that as far as ICANN approved Arabic (Persian) and Chinese characters to be registered as Domain Name, all of the browser-making companies (Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc.) have to support Unicode in URLs without any encoding, and those should be searchable by Google, etc.

So this issue will resolve ASAP.

For me this is the correct way, This just worked:

    $linker = rawurldecode("$link");
    <a href="<?php echo $link;?>"	target="_blank"><?php echo $linker ;?></a>

This worked, and now links are displayed properly:

http://newspaper.annahar.com/article/121638-معرض--جوزف-حرب-في-غاليري-جانين-ربيز-لوحاته-الجدية-تبحث-وتكتشف-وتفرض-الاحترام

Link found on:

http://www.galeriejaninerubeiz.com/newsite/news

Use percent-encoded form. Some (mainly old) computers running Windows XP for example do not support Unicode, but rather ISO encodings. That is the reason percent-encoded URLs were invented. Also, if you give a URL printed on paper to a user, containing characters that cannot be easily typed, that user may have a hard time typing it (or just ignore it). Percent-encoded form can even be used in many of the oldest machines that ever existed (although they don't support internet of course).

There is a downside though, as percent-encoded characters are longer than the original ones, thus possibly resulting in really long URLs. But just try to ignore it, or use a URL shortener (I would recommend goo.gl in this case, which makes a 13-character long URL). Also, if you don't want to register for a Google account, try bit.ly (bit.ly makes slightly longer URLs, with the length being 14 characters).