Unicode / Foreign URLs

Recently, I came across a need to create a redirect for a URL that contained a unicode character. The url was something like

www.somedomain.com/réseau (notice the accented character)

While this would be easy to type for French people, it isn’t so for others, like Americans. To accomodate different possible spellings, a good practice is to create a redirect for 2 alternative spellings so that any one of the following URLs resolve:

www.somedomain.com/réseau
www.somedomain.com/r%C3%A9seau
www.somedomain.com/reseau

This way, percent-encoded URLs will work and people who don’t feel like finding out how to type “é” can just type “e” and that would work as well 🙂