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When I put cyrillic symbols in address bar like this:

http://ru2.php.net/manual-lookup.php?pattern=привет

it switches to

http://ru2.php.net/manual-lookup.php?pattern=%EF%F0%E8%E2%E5%F2

What does that characters -- %EF%F0%E8%E2%E5%F2 -- mean? And why is it happening?

animuson
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Vadim Samokhin
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1 Answers1

5

The characters are getting URL encoded. A URL may only contain a subset of ASCII characters, so anything outside plain alphanumeric and some special characters must be URL encoded.

Some browsers display non-ASCII characters as human readable characters, but that's entirely up to them. In protocols, URLs are always URL encoded.

Matti Virkkunen
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  • cite from php.net: Returns a string in which all non-alphanumeric characters except -_. have been replaced with a percent (%) sign followed by two hex digits and spaces encoded as plus (+) signs. But what do those "two hex digits" mean? – Vadim Samokhin Jun 26 '11 at 11:49
  • @Zapadlo: Thank you very much for posting a snippet from the documentation of a more or less random language. – Matti Virkkunen Jun 26 '11 at 11:50
  • Thank you for reading my comment so carefully. Try once more, from the beginning. [Hint: cite from php.net. php.net. php.] Congrats, you got it. – Vadim Samokhin Jun 26 '11 at 12:50