CopyingInternationalURLs

Summary: Some hints and tricks to copy URLs with international (UTF-8) characters

Version: new

Prerequisites:

Status:

Maintainer: HansB

Users: (view ? / edit)

Discussion: CopyingInternationalURLs-Talk ?

Questions answered by this recipe

How can I copy an URL which contains international non-ASCII characters in the address bar?

Usage

On international web sites the address bar of your browser may show international non-ASCII characters. Because non-ASCII characters are not permitted in URLs, these characters are most likely url-encoded UTF-8 characters, and the browser decodes these to display them readable. If you now copy such a URL from the browser's address bar to your wiki page (insert into the edit text form), you most likely see the url-encoded URL,,with lots of %nn . Although this is functional and correct, it is not pretty and may not be what you want.

Here are some tips to copy the address without the url-encoding:

Copy the address with a space added: Put cursor in address bar, on keyboard press Right Arrow, Space, Ctrl + A (to highlight all) and Ctrl + C (to copy). Then paste into the text form field. By changing the URL string the browser will not encode it.
Copy just part of the URL, for instance leaving out the https://
Configuring the browser so it will decode the URL.
1. For Firefox you can do this: Type about:config in address bar, search for urlbar, toggle value of browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopy to True

Example, from same site, both will form correct links:
URL copied as-is (url-encoded):

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%e3%82%b8%e3%83%a3%e3%82%a4%e3%82%a2%e3%83%b3%e3%83%88%e3%83%91%e3%83%b3%e3%83%80

URL copied decoded:

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ジャイアントパンダ

Notes

Contributors

HansB

Comments

See discussion at CopyingInternationalURLs-Talk ?

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