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Issues with Non-ASCII Chars in URLs
By dennisp
on Monday, 11 January 2010, 23:35
Published under:
ajax
article
unicode
url
Views: 9918, comments: 1
This is a very quick post to warn developers about gotchas with using non-ascii chars in URLs (especially when making AJAX calls).
I discovered this odd behaviour quite unexpectedly, and I believe this can help others.
When you type an URL into the browser's address bar, the browsers should do the following for every non-ascii character:
a) convert it into UTF-8
b) convert it into the %HH code.
So, for say Cyrillic letters your server should be receiving 6 characters in the URL for every non-ASCII char typed into the address bar. This works with all modern versions of browsers, with one big exception - the characters in query string (ie, after the question mark), will not be encoded in that way. For me, it's some single-byte encoding (I didn't have time to investigate).
Note this happens for typeins only; when you follow a link from a page where the content-type explicitly sets UTF-8, then the query strings will be properly encoded into UTF-8 and then into %HH form. This bug affects IE8 and FF3 (please check and comment for other browsers).
As a solution for one live site, I had to update URL rewriting from:
http://www.exaplle.com/topic?someutfstring
to
http://www.exaplme.com/topic-someutfstring
This causes browsers to treat someotherstring as part of URL, not as part of the query string.
Another bug is manifesting in IE8 only. If you set a JS variable to some UTF-8 string, and then use that string to construct an URL for an AJAX call, that string will not be encoded into UTF-8 and then to %HH form. Instead, IE will use some other, non-unicode encoding.
A quick solution is to inject the JS variable as an URL-encoded string, eg instead of:
var myVar='someutfstring';
use:
var myVar='
<?= urlencode('someutfstring');?>
';
Note that in this article I am assuming that your PHP script source files are in UTF8 and the content served is UTF-8 (including the response headers which explicitly say so).
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Comments
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#1
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By
Anonymous
on Tuesday, 12 January 2010, 02:14
After testing this out on my installs of FF3.5, and 3.6b5. The russian characters come back as UTF8 for both /topic?russian, and /topic-russian.
My Browser Language, and System locale are US English, and as there is no Russian in ISO-8859-1, they are being encoding as UTF-8 properly.
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