Usage of unicode characters in URL

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the base of this question comes from the fact that in many latin languages, and also in many non-latin languages there are letters that from what I've seen, up until recently were not really usable in URLs and nearly always ended up generating a big bunch of URL encoded characters.

But, recently I've seen several sites using native letters in URLs (except for domain).

Something like this for example using spanish accented letters:

https://www.example.com/esta-es-una-frase-en-español
https://www.example.com/cómo-usar-acentos-y-la-letra-ñ-en-urls

Also, I've seen URLs like

https://www.example.com/урл-на-български

From what I remember in terms of experience, not so long ago one had to either encode or convert accented characters to non-accented ones.

But now you can use this type of URL in the browser and it makes no issue and the letters appear as they should (not URL-encoded).

Is it safe to assume that now my URLs can handle these characters?

Also, is there any difference in terms of URL indexing for Google?

non-ascii-characters compatibility unicode url
1 Answers

URIs/URLs, as defined by RFC 3986 "Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", do not allow unencoded non-ASCII characters. Such characters must be charset-encoded (usually to UTF-8) and the resulting byte octets are then percent-encoded. If a browser is given a URL with unencoded Unicode characters in it, the browser will typically url-encode it properly behind the scenes when transmitting it to a web server. You can verify this with your browser's built-in debugger (if it has one) or an HTTP/S sniffer.

IRIs, as defined by RFC 3987 "Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs)", do allow unencoded Unicode characters. IRIs are not in widespread use yet, however IRIs can maintain backwards compatibility by mapping to/from encoded URIs/URLs. It is possible that your browser may be treating the content of the address bar as an IRI, converting it to/from an URI/URL internally as needed.

user_658630
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