404 when file has non-latin characters in it

Server Config
1

I get a 404 when a file or the path has non-Latin characters in it. Examples:

http://example.com/Århus/some_image.jpg
http://example.com/beer/øl.jpg

Both of these result in a 404 even though I know the path exists. The access logs say this (for the top one above):

86.30.140.183 - - [18/Apr/2011:10:04:12 -0700] "GET /%C3%85rhus/some_image.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 516 "http://example.com/%C3%85rhus/some_image.jpg" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0"

What I actually see in the browser’s 404 message is this:

http://example.com/Ãrhus/some_image.jpg

which is why it’s resulting in a 404 - the “Å” character is being turned into something else. I tried adding this to my .htaccess file to no avail:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

This is only happening on my webserver (shared hosting, so no access to httpd.conf and friends). On XAMPP on Windows I don’t have this problem.

Any ideas how to get Apache to deal with this problem?

2

Try to see if the system is configured with UTF-8
Verify that the apache files are encoded in UTF-8
Change the default Charset set in the global configuration file

3

I can’t do all these things, because I have no access to the global configuration stuff (as I said in my original post).

The .htaccess file is encoded in UTF-8.

4

In this example You use the reserved characters for URIs with their respective character codes in percent-encoding, e. g. %C3%85 for a Ã.

See Percent-encoding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for more details.

May be you need rename files and directories that they should not contain reserved characters.

5

I tried using URL encoding and it was the same problem. Renaming them is what I ended up doing. Thanks for your help.