Individual skill

special-chars

Use when applies to any site with user-generated slugs, CMS-generated URLs, or content in non-English languages. Use when auditing URLs for crawl errors or canonicalization issues.

skills/special-chars/SKILL.md

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Observed behavior: Instructions only
Last checked: Nov 9, 2026

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Repository stars (not skill ratings): 74,693
Repository last updated: Oct 31, 2026
License: MIT

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frontend Repository topic
front-end-development Repository topic
front-end-developer-tool Repository topic
guidelines Repository topic
checklist Repository topic
reference Repository topic
web-development Repository topic
html Repository topic
css Repository topic
javascript Repository topic
writing Derived category

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SKILL.mdcore · 2,241 bytes
references/rule.mddoc · 4,214 bytes

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# URL Special Characters

Special characters in URL paths cause inconsistent crawling, broken links when shared, and canonicalization failures when different systems encode them differently.

## Quick Reference

- URL paths should contain only unreserved characters: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, `-`, `_`, `.`, `~`
- Spaces must be encoded as `%20` (not `+`, which is query-string syntax)
- Characters like `#`, `?`, `&`, `=` have reserved meaning in URLs and must be percent-encoded in path segments
- Non-ASCII characters (accented letters, CJK) should be percent-encoded in URLs, though modern browsers decode them for display

## Check

Scan all crawled URL paths for characters outside `[A-Za-z0-9\-_./~]`. Flag URLs containing spaces (`%20` or literal), special symbols (`#`, `?`, `&`, `=`, `+` in paths), or unencoded non-ASCII characters. Check if different encodings of the same URL return separate 200 responses.