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Getting non-ascii chars in URLs passed correctly. Getting 404s due to "ascii-ifying" URLs

I have some files on my web server with non-ascii (in fact, non-Latin) chars in their filenames.
For example:
rÅ‘l.txt

That is, letter r, then letter o with double acute accent, letter L, and the extension. The double acute accent is detailed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_acute_accent

It looks like this site is also unablwe to show the character correctly. Tsk tsk.

When I make a request for the page, I always get a 404. Looking in the logd I see that the server is seeking rol.txt, and of course not finding it.
THis is true using
http://server/rÅ‘l.txt
or
http://servcer/r%c5%91l.txt

In the IIS logs I see:
21:45:38 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 GET /rol.txt - 404 3535 819 40 ...

My Web.sitemap contains the correct URL with the accented character.

It appears that the browser is making the correct request, but that the server is not seeing the right chars, URL-encoded or not.
Please advise how to make this work.

SteveH_UK

URLs should be encoded before passing. At the moment, not all systems support internationalised URL encoding as described here http://www.w3.org/International/O-URL-code.html

Your best bet is to sanitise filenames before they are stored on your server.

Otherwise, you may find that the international encoding described above will help.

SteveH_UK

Note that many URL encoding schemes encode URLs according to the non-internationalised standard, i.e. they only support 7-bit ASCII, or if you are lucky 8-bit. Neither of these support Unicode directly.

dc197

ASKER

I developed the site using VS2005 and its internal webserver. This fully supports unicode chars, and the site works just fine, whether one uses URL-encoded requests or not.

I copied the source over to my dev machine for testing, which is running IIS5 as the webserver. This is where the problem arose. Is IIS5 the culprit? Is IIS6 better?

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SteveH_UK

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dc197

ASKER

OK it looks like IIS6 has support for unicode URLs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/03/IIS6/) as well as better logging. That's good, because the site I wish to host heavily features the Hungarian language, in which o is not the same as Ã³, Ã¶ or Å‘.

Cheers.

dc197

ASKER

It would appear that this site's ability to handle non-standard chars sucks, too.

SteveH_UK

Actually, they have recently opened an Experts Exchange bug on this issue, and I have been assisting!

It's a fairly standard issue. For example the PHP language doesn't support Unicode particularly well, and it certainly can make coding harder.

Nevertheless, in my view that is no excuse and I always make sure any forms I code support Unicode fully and do not assume Latin character sets unless appropriate!

SteveH_UK

So, if you are coding for Hungarian, I recommend that you encode your pages in UTF-8, that you use HTML entities for posting/returning form values, that you always set the HTTP headers (not just those in the HTML page!) and that you TEST, TEST, TEST!

Good luck :)

Getting non-ascii chars in URLs passed correctly. Getting 404s due to &quot;ascii-ifying&quot; URLs

Getting non-ascii chars in URLs passed correctly. Getting 404s due to "ascii-ifying" URLs