When my URL contains a get with "בלה בלה"
, the url stays in hebrew and when I do echo $_GET['hebrew'], it outputs it in hebrew, great. However, when it contains "São Paulo", it starts going nuts, the URL changes to "S%E3o%20Paulo" and the output is "S�o Paulo".
This gets me extremely frustrated, can anyone of you guys help me with this??
The only safe thing to do is to create URL's that have %xx for the UTF-8, not non-ASCII characters. If you do otherwise, your mileage will vary all over the place. The process of turning a byte sequence into one with %xx escapes is called URL-encoding. You'll need a PHP expert to tell you how to do that there.
You can encode your URLs using urlencode, which a browser usually does for you, but as @bmargulies mentions your mileage may vary with different character sets if you don't encode your URLs.