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copied!<p>The character ç is encoded in the URL as %E7. This is how ISO-8859-1 encodes ç. The ISO-8859-1 character set represents a character with a single byte. The byte which represents ç can be expressed in hex as E7.</p> <p>In Unicode, ç has a code point of U+00E7. Unlike ISO-8859-1, in which the code point (E7) is the same as it's encoding (E7 in hex), Unicode has multiple encoding schemes such as UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32. UTF-8 encodes U+00E7 (ç) as two bytes - C3 A7.</p> <p>See <a href="http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00e7/index.htm" rel="noreferrer">here</a> for other ways to encode ç. </p> <p>As to why U+00E7 and E7 in ISO-8859-1 both use "E7", the first 256 code points in Unicode were made identical to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode" rel="noreferrer">ISO-8859-1</a>.</p> <p>If this URL were UTF-8, ç would be encoded as %C3%A7. My (very limited) understanding of <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#page-220" rel="noreferrer">RFC2616</a> is that the default encoding for a URL is (currently) ISO-8859-1. Therefore, this is most likely ISO-8859-1 encoded URL. Which means, the best approach is probably to check that the encoding is valid and if not, assume it is ISO-8859-1 and transcode it to UTF-8:</p> <pre><code>unless query.valid_encoding? query.encode!("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", :invalid => :replace, :undef => :replace, :replace => "") end </code></pre> <p>Here's the process in IRB (plus an escaping at the end for fun)</p> <pre><code>a = CGI.unescape("%E7") => "\xE7" a.encoding => #<Encoding:UTF-8> a.valid_encoding? => false b = a.encode("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1") # From ISO-8859-1 -> UTF-8 => "ç" b.encoding => #<Encoding:UTF-8> CGI.escape(b) => "%C3%A7" </code></pre>

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