Usamah M. Ali wrote:
I'm trying hard to implement IRIs support for my wiki site, which is still under development. The percent-espace part of a non-UTF8 encoded URI is really really unfriendly. The browsers support for IRIs varies considerable albeit all them (except IE6 which needs an add-on for that) are claiming built-in IRIs/IDNs support (I don't care about IDNs for now). The best being Opera which displays IRIs just perfectly (you can check it on the Arabic Wikipedia). IE7 also has built-in IRIs support but it doesn't work no matter what I've done. I have the right settings in Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced: Send UTF-8 URLs, but still it doesn't work!
Firefox support it by setting the value of "network.standard-url.encode-utf8" in about:config to true (default is false), but yet again it doesn't work!
WikiMedia URLs are not just paths to files or articles; actually one can learn many things about MediaWiki's structure and architecure by looking at a URL, and that's why I'm persistant in getting them to work.
Well, it sounds like what you're trying to do is to have the URLs displayed in the browser without the percent encoding.
Some browsers will strip out the percents on UTF-8 URLs when they display them (say, Safari), while some don't (say, Firefox). There's a longstanding bug entry for Firefox to do this, not yet firmly addressed.
Some will only show the pretty Unicode characters if you don't encode the URLs you generate yourself... others will re-encode them for you even if you pass an unencoded IRI.
You might try messing about with the wfUrlencode() function a bit in GlobalSettings.php. Be sure not to break the encoding of characters which *must* be encoded!
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)