Here’s a fun one for y’all: did you know it’s possible to put multi-byte UTF-8 characters in URLs, and even use them as GET parameters?

Somebody posted a link to Skype’s new Theme Design contest for their Mac app, but I lost interest in the entries as soon as I saw the URL:

“Wait,” I said almost out loud, “was that a checkmark in the URL?” (Actually, it was out loud. My cat looked over at me, then went back to sleep, totally uninterested in all this crap.)

I cottoned on right away – of course it’s possible to put UTF-8 characters in the URL parameters. Why wouldn’t it be? In fact, people have probably been doing this for years!

Nonetheless, I had a little play around with it, and in case anybody’s interested, the code is below.

I think it looks pretty spiffy.

I have no idea if this would work cross-browser (I’m on Chrome) or cross-platform (I’m on … you guessed it.) All I know is it’s probably a good idea to specify the encoding of your page, like so:

<meta charset="UTF-8">
<?php foreach ( $_GET as $key => $val )
	echo "<pre><strong>'{$key}:</strong> {$val}</pre>'; ?>

Might be a disaster, in the wild. But heck – try it out and see what happens – Skype did!

# Just a side-note: if you’re testing the values in PHP, it’s probably a good idea to do some encoding-related things beforehand, like decoding the parameters and comparison strings. I’m no PHP expert, but I know it can be a pain in the arse when it comes to encoding.

## Also interesting to note – this post’s URL is accessible at both /utf-8-multibyte-characters-in-url-parameters-✓/ and /utf-8-multibyte-characters-in-url-parameters-%E2%9C%93/