Take the community feedback survey now.

K Khan
Sep 19, 2024
  1090
(1 votes)

keep special characters in URL

When creating a page, the default URL segment validation automatically replaces special characters with their standard equivalents (e.g., "ä" is replaced with "a"). However, some clients may require these special characters to remain intact in URLs for non-English versions of their website.

var validChars = "ü ö ä ß ó ñ á á é í ó ő ú ü ñ"; 

For CMS 12

//Startup.cs
services.Configure<UrlSegmentOptions>(config => {
    config.SupportIriCharacters = true;
    config.ValidCharacters = @"A-Za-z0-9\-_~\.\$" + validChars;
}); 

For CMS 11

[InitializableModule]
[ModuleDependency(typeof(EPiServer.Web.InitializationModule))]
public class UrlSegmentConfigurationModule : IConfigurableModule
{
    public void ConfigureContainer(ServiceConfigurationContext context)
    {
        var validChars = "ü ö ä ß ó ñ á á é í ó ő ú ü ñ"; 
        context.Services.RemoveAll<UrlSegmentOptions>();
        context.Services.AddSingleton<UrlSegmentOptions>(s => new UrlSegmentOptions
        {
            SupportIriCharacters = true,
            ValidCharacters = @"\p{L}0-9\-_~\.\$" + validChars
        });
    }

    public void Initialize(InitializationEngine context){}

    public void Uninitialize(InitializationEngine context) { }
}

References:

Sep 19, 2024

Comments

Mark Stott
Mark Stott Sep 20, 2024 08:18 AM

Hello Khan,

It's worth noting that the builtin Optimizely behaviour is in alignment with the current RFC 3986 URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) specification.  I've had issues before with non-compliant characters within URLs and iterpretation by the browser and documentation platforms with confusion of encoding.  In these cases I would personally recommend against this.

K Khan
K Khan Sep 20, 2024 08:25 AM

Make sense, thanks for sharing.

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
New Opal Certifications Are Live and Free!

We’ve got some exciting news to share: two brand-new Opal certifications are now available and they’re completely free. Whether you’re already...

Satata Satez | Sep 10, 2025

Going Headless: On-Page Editing with Optimizely Graph and Next.js

Introduction On-page editing is one of the standout features of Optimizely CMS, giving editors the power to update content directly on the site as...

Michał Mitas | Sep 10, 2025

Dynamic CSP Management for Headless and Hybrid Optimizely CMS with Next.js

In the evolving realm of web security, Content Security Policy (CSP) is essential for defending against XSS and injection attacks. Traditional...

Minesh Shah (Netcel) | Sep 8, 2025

Create a Simple home page in Optimizely CMS

  Introduction In this blog post, I will walk you through a step by step process to create a very basic home page on a Optimizley CMS Empty site....

Ratish | Sep 7, 2025 |