Ask HN: Why do Greek or Russian characters get URL encoded?

by greeklish on 10/13/2021, 11:18:28 PM with 3 comments
Why don't browsers URL encode just the special characters such as ?, & and whitespaces when a URL is copied?

The resulting URLs would be much cleaner and easier to understand for native speakers.

  • by ignoranceprior on 10/14/2021, 12:15:45 AM

    I think technically a URL/URI is only supposed to contain ASCII characters, and certain things that expect URL input will want ASCII only. However, all modern browsers can convert from Unicode to punycode (in the domain name) and percent-encoding (in the path). So I don't really understand why browsers only let you copy the percent-encoded form easily.

  • by WizardOfLight on 10/13/2021, 11:29:33 PM

    It’s to avoid malware domains and similar applications of various malfeasance. In short, because they can be used to obfuscate the actually intended url copied, such as fасеbook <— this has Cyrillic characters in it you can’t otherwise notice.