Encoding URIs with foreign characters

Question

1. I want to display characters like "é,ë,ñ,עברית" as is in the urls. How can I do that? When I type something like "page.php?name=é" it turns the url into "page.php?name=%E9", not what I desire.

2. There seems to be a problem with .htaccess when rewriting the url, it would just output error message. How can I fix it? (this is the rule btw):

   RewriteRule ^(/*[a-zA-Z0-9\%]*)$ /page.php?name=$1

Answer 1

According to RFC 1738 this isnt possible.

http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm

This is an excellent reference page explaining it in laymans terms.