Do I really need to remove special characters in a URL?

Posted by anarchoi on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by anarchoi
Published on 2013-06-15T01:45:20Z Indexed on 2013/06/26 4:29 UTC
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I have an FTP account shared with friends where we upload underground music albums and then we use the links to share the downloads in a music forum. The problem is that the album names are in french so there is a lot of special characters in the name.

So the URL looks like http://www.mydomain.com/downloads/Some Band - En français avec des caractères spéciaux (2013) [7'' EP].zip

For me it works perfectly and I can download the file by using this URL, but I have read everywhere that special chars are bad in URL.

Is there any reason why I must remove the special characters or encode the URL? Is everyone able to access a URL with special characters or will some older browsers not be able to download the files?

I really don't care about SEO or anything else. I just want the download links to work for everyone.

Since the files are uploaded through FTP, I can't use PHP to remove the special characters with a regex, so I really don't know what to do.

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