URL shows the wrong address with lots of "%" characters

Question

On my site I have a problem with my URL address from my Bulgarian version of my page. Why does it show lots of % characters in my URL? For example like this page.

When the URL really should look like this:

econello.com/bg/застраховки/

Is there any setting I forgot to set?

Answer 1

This is percent-encoding, and in URIs it’s required for characters that are outside of the allowed set (which only includes a-z, A-Z, 0-9, and several special characters like -, /, ., etc.).

Many browsers display the decoded URL in their address bars. You can try it yourself: copy-paste the percent-encoded URL into Firefox’ address bar and hit Enter. It will display

/bg/застраховки/

instead of

/bg/%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B8/

So there’s nothing you have to (or should) change.

(While IRIs would allow other characters, I think they typically get converted to URIs with percent-encoding for backwards compatibility, or because it’s considered to be an author error, as in HTML 4.01.)