Unicode in URLs not completely correct for Firefox 3

In the table of section "Unicode in URLs" (part 1), it is said that Firefox
3 uses UTF-8 for "Request URL query string encoding for manually entered
URLs". This is actually not completely true.

It looks like Firefox 3 does the following:
  - if all the characters in the query string can be encoded in the
machine's default encoding, this encoding is used.
  - otherwise, UTF-8 is used.

Let me explain. I'm using a French machine with a default encoding is
CP-1252 (similar to ISO-8859-1).

The URL http://www.google.com/search?q=é procudes
http://www.google.com/search?q=%E9, whereas
http://www.google.com/search?q=ąé produces
http://www.google.com/search?q=%C4%85%C3%A9.

In the first case, the "é" character was converted to %E9 which is
ISO-8859-1. In the second case, it was converted to %C3%A9, which is UTF-8.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by Alexis.S...@gmail.com on 28 Jan 2009 at 1:06

exported / browsersec

Unicode in URLs not completely correct for Firefox 3 #16