whats the best way to represent unicode symbols in a URL?

Question

I am building a site that uses Japanese as input and i want to make sure that the urls are readable and make sense.

For example, a typical url would be:

domain.com/123/post_title

or in japanese:

domain.com/123/ハーパー

However, most browser are seemingly not able to render that as a url. I am able to use the default encodings so the url looks like:

domain.com/123/+%E3%83%8F%E3%83%BC%E3%83%91%E3%83%BC

or even rendering it into punycode:

domain.com/123/xn--mdke2kb

Both of these solutions are not helpful to the user, and are kind of ugly.

Is there anyway to render Unicode into phonetics or to something that is not so obfuscated or annoying?

Thanks.

Answer 1

By default, most browsers support only the ASCII character set for URLs. IDN (Internationalized Domain Names) allows the use of unicode URLs, but must be turned on or added on. Most browsers don't support IDN by default because of security concerns - phishing sites can use unicode URLs that look identical to legitimate URLs by using unicode characters that mimic common ASCII ones.

Presumably anyone habitually browsing Japanese web sites would have IDN support enabled. For the rest of the world, you might want to have copies of your pages with ASCII names.