I've noticed that a lot of websites, when searching or just browsing, will add a get variable called utf and set it equal to a check mark (?utf8=?).
utf
?utf8=?
Two examples are:
Dotabuff has its search URL include it. Example: dotabuff.com/search?utf8=?&q=PPD
Bibme also has its search URL include it. Example: bibme.org/mla/website-citation/search?utf8=?&q=someurl.com
URIs contain utf8=? to force the client to send UTF-8. It works because the key-value-pair (which is ignored by the target) contains a unicode-only character.
utf8=?
From Is the use of “utf8=?” preferable to “utf8=true”?:
By default, older versions of IE (<=8) will submit form data in Latin-1 encoding if possible. By including a character that can't be expressed in Latin-1, IE is forced to use UTF-8 encoding for its form submissions, which simplifies various backend processes, for example database persistence. If the parameter was instead utf8=true then this wouldn't trigger the UTF-8 encoding in these browsers.
By default, older versions of IE (<=8) will submit form data in Latin-1 encoding if possible. By including a character that can't be expressed in Latin-1, IE is forced to use UTF-8 encoding for its form submissions, which simplifies various backend processes, for example database persistence.
If the parameter was instead utf8=true then this wouldn't trigger the UTF-8 encoding in these browsers.
utf8=true
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