Unicode characters are forbidden as per the RFC on URLs. They need to be percent encoded to be standards compliant. The Javascript escape and unescape functions do not correspond with what browsers actually do… hence this tool.
Note that currently, all major browsers seem to be parsing unicode URLs okay no matter what the RFC says. But beware, this 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
So, use percent encoding. Modern browsers will take care of display & paste issues and make it human-readable.
Launch 8bit Standard URL Encoder
