I am working on a requirement to display (make readable) characters from the URL.
When I use Google Chrome, it displays the parameters in Chinese - even though they are encoded to UTF-8.
When I use Mozilla Firefox, it displays the parameters in Chinese - even though they are encoded to UTF-8.
When I use Internet Explorer, it displays the parameters encoded in UTF-8.
N.B. The URL is encoded to UTF-8; I know that because when I copy the URL from the three of them and paste it to Notepad++ the three of them display the following:
/%E6%89%93%E5%BC%80%E7%9B%AE%E5%BD%95/%E7%9B%B8%E6%9C%BA/%E6%95%B0%E7%A0%81%E7%9B%B8%E6%9C%BA/%E5%B0%8F%E5%9E%8B%E6%95%B0%E7%A0%81%E7%9B%B8%E6%9C%BA/PowerShot-A480/p/1934793
Could it be that Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome guys have this improvement that can make an encoded String readable and perhaps the IE guys do not support that? Or, is there any way to activate that with IE?
By the way... Going to View >> Encoding >> Unicode (UTF-8) takes care of the text inside of the page but does not make any difference for the text in the URL.
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
I've written a blog post about Internet Explorer not displaying the decoded version of non-ASCII characters and using IRIs to solve the problem.
As of today, we have the following situation:
HTML5 supports IRIs, i.e. URIs with Unicode character support
HTTP does not support IRIs, but all major browsers take care of converting IRIs to valid (encoded) URIs to retrieve the specified resource (page).
IE supports IRIs in the href attribute of anchor tags and properly displays them in its address bar just like when you enter your URL by hand (keyboard ;-)).
If you choose to percent-encode your IRI thus making it a URI, IE will not decode that URI back into an IRI.
So you could try the following:
Save your HTML files using UTF-8. This allows you to insert any Unicode character into it.
Do not percent-encode your URLs inside your HTML pages' links. Just use links like this: 亦思巴奚兵乱
A great article on the topic can also be found at the W3C: An Introduction to Multilingual Web Addresses.
Related
My website encoding is ISO-8859-1.
ISO-8859-1 is defined as charset in the web pages and Google Search results have always looked good.
However, for several weeks now, special characters (é, à, è, â, etc.) are replaced by � in the Google Search results, for both page titles and page descriptions.
Screenshot of the Google Search rendering
The charset is defined on each page:
And the website looks good with all web browsers, there is no encoding errors.
I've realized that HTTrack can't download files if urls have special characters in them, like german ß - it returns a 404 response.
Errors look like on screenshot:
Is there any setting in HTTrack to make it able to deal with such characters?
ps: I found a similar thread, but without an answer:
Httrack faulty when encountering japanese encoded URLS
HTTrack seems to be able to get files errorfree from urls with special characters, only if you don't run a "real" domain crawl, but:
firstly create an url list,
save it as iso-8859-1,
than let HTTrack crawl this list
If HTTrack will explore urls by its own, it will run into 404 errors on urls with special characters - at least i wasn't able to get them errorfree. Maybe somebody will provide a magic setting ;)
I was fooling around on my phone and decided to try putting an emoji in the url bar of google chrome. I entered in 😀.com, the emoji which is equivalent to unicode U+1F600. Chrome ended up evaluating that as http://xn--e28h.com/, which took me to a "webpage unavailable" screen (ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED). I looked up xn--e28h on godaddy and it was unavailable.
Here are my questions:
Why did 😀 turn into xn--e28h? I don't see any relation with the unicode.
Why are domains of this format unavailable on godaddy?
Bonus question: why can't we put emojis in domain names?
DNS uses a special way to encode Unicode into ASCII. The xn-- prefix says that it's an encoded name, and since the whole name in this case is one Unicode codepoint the rest just looks incomprehensible. You can start reading more about this here.
Most (if not all) top-level domains have rules on which Unicode characters they allow for names in that TLD. For example, .SE only allows those characters that are used in one of the official languages of Sweden. This is entirely a policy thing, so the "why" gets fuzzy.
See 2.
If I navigate to the following URL with a special UTF8 encoded character I get different results in web browsers:
http://example.com/lörickè
Firefox 37 - Shows the correct URL as above.
Chrome 42 - Shows the correct URL as above.
Edge - Shows the correct URL as above.
IE 11 - Shows percent encoded URL http://example.com/l%c3%b6rick%c3%a8/
Where can I find a list of browsers and versions that support this feature and are there any announcements of whether the new Microsoft Edge browser supports this.
This StackOverflow post highlights the above issue for those interested.
What is shown in browser address bars is not necessarily what is used internally.
If you enter http://example.com/lörickè in Firefox, it gets shown like that, but it actually gets percent-encoded and becomes http://example.com/l%C3%B6rick%C3%A8. This is for usability reasons (or, if IRIs are not supported, like in HTTP/1.1, for transforming an IRI into a URI), so users don’t necessarily have to enter the correct URL (with percent-encoding), and don’t get confused by seeing these cryptic parts.
You can easily check what really gets used by copy-pasting the URL from the address bar into a text document.
So the three browsers from your example probably use the same URI (i.e., percent-encoded), but two browsers decided to display the un-encoded variant instead.
As Stack Overflow seems to be unable to create links from URLs that have spaces in them, copy and paste this URL into your browser.
http://grooveshark.com/#!/search/song?q=we will rock you
It does not redirect you to ...song?q=we%20will%20rock%20you or anything like that.
The spaces just simply stay there. When I first saw this, it looked so foreign to me. How is this achieved?
I believe they use javascript to set the contents of the url bar. You can use something like Live HTTP Headers to confirm that the browser definitely sends a request with %20 encoded spaces.
It’s a browser setting. The browser decodes the URL, to make it more readable for humans.
If you copy the URL from the browser’s address bar and paste it into a text document, you’ll see that the space characters are percent-encoded.
See How can I see how the browser percent-encoded my URL? (which is not visible on address bar)