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What characters are allowed unencoded in query strings?
A couple of months ago I advised people to Be careful with non-ascii characters in URLs. We’ve been discussing that at work lately, more specifically whether characters like “:” and “/” are allowed unencoded in query strings or not.
I may well have made mistakes trying to understand the specification, so any help clarifying any errors in the following would be appreciated.
The summary of my previous post is this:
In essence this means that the only characters you can reliably use for the actual name parts of a URL are
a-z,A-Z,0-9,-,.,_, and~. Any other characters need to be Percent encoded.
But what about those query strings? After studying RFC 3986 - Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax I’ve come to the following conclusions.
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Be careful with non-ascii characters in URLs
Unless you have really strong internationalisation requirements, consider sticking to the following characters in URLs: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, ., _, and ~.
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