URL encoding issues for a french article ?!

Hey, yesterday we've published a french blogpost and I noticed smth strange happening with the URL. In the WP editor, the address looks fine, but when I paste it (in Skype, FB, the address bar) it adds some odd symbols like: %d0%b5 . Also when I visit the website it's also fine. Actually, when I paste it in the address bar of the browser the odd symbols appear, but then when you hit enter and it loads looks fine. So it had to with the encoding or smth.

It seems that the symbols are added for a specific letter part of the URL.

The URL address is

websitename/blog/les-7-mеilleurs-jeux-de-cartes-a-deux

and it changes to:

websitename/blog/les-7-m%d0%b5illeurs-jeux-de-cartes-a-deux

So, the issue should be coming from the second letter of the word "mеilleurs" - E.

Checked other indexed articles in Google in French that contain the same word and how they appear but they look OK.

Also tried to paste the URL into a text editor to clear formatting but nothing changes.
I thought it could be due to using let's say the "E" symbol from another language by mistake (Cyrillic alphabet for example). Or from the difference between the French "E" and the English "E". But then again I tried to rewrite the URL address in WP from my English keyboard and the issue remains.

PS: I don't speak French and we have a writer who wrote the content piece.

The article is not yet indexed and I'm not going to submit it via the SC until this is resolved.

Any ideas?

I'm not sure if you try this, basic permalink

WP - Settings - Permalink - Choose your custom URL structure

EDIT: It is on WP, right? I'm still on my first coffee this morning

Btw, you know you can remove URL on Facebook, not sure for Twitter.
Once you copy and pasted on FB, it will show up your site post with image and title, you can just remove your site and it will still show up.

Just copy/paste it, wait for 3 seconds, remove site URL.

In that way, you have clear post, unless you want to have your link included post.

Yeah, it's the e. You have the cyrillic е.
Update the title and the permalink. Add another random letter in the new URL so you're sure it has been edited and not cached (and then later remove the extra letter when you're sure it's correct)

Wordpress got some default rewrite about cyrillic shit, for example, many germany symbols contain tones also will rewrite if it appears on slugs, I guess there are some ways to turn it off, but can't sure.

MrDenz said:

I'm not sure if you try this, basic permalink

WP - Settings - Permalink - Choose your custom URL structure

EDIT: It is on WP, right? I'm still on my first coffee this morning

Btw, you know you can remove URL on Facebook, not sure for Twitter.
Once you copy and pasted on FB, it will show up your site post with image and title, you can just remove your site and it will still show up.

Just copy/paste it, wait for 3 seconds, remove site URL.

In that way, you have clear post, unless you want to have your link included post.

Click to expand...

Haha, no worries it's still early in my country, too But yeah as I mentioned it's on WP.

Sure, I know I can remove the URL, but I just gave that as an example of what the issue is. And I'm wondering how it can be fixed or to prevent it in future.

"WP - Settings - Permalink - Choose your custom URL structure" - yes, this works fine and we are using it, so it's all good with that.

yakuzaemme said:

Yeah, it's the e. You have the cyrillic е.
Update the title and the permalink. Add another random letter in the new URL so you're sure it has been edited and not cached (and then later remove the extra letter when you're sure it's correct)

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's why I went and tried with my English keyboard but the issue persists, so should not be from that...

NeVeRFoLdinG said:

Yeah, that's why I went and tried with my English keyboard but the issue persists, so should not be from that...

Click to expand...

No, it definitely is that - you're probably not updating the permalink.
%d0%b5 translates to cyrillic e.

Update the URL to /test-les-7-meilleurs-jeux-de-cartes-a-deux - see that it works with 'test', then remove test.

NeVeRFoLdinG said:

Yeah, that's why I went and tried with my English keyboard but the issue persists, so should not be from that...

Click to expand...

Maybe you're just trying to update the post title. The permalink doesn't change after your first save, you have to edit this manually

mrtruehybrid said:

Maybe you're just trying to update the post title. The permalink doesn't change after your first save, you have to edit this manually

Click to expand...

Well, of course not This was not the first time I'm editing it ;D It was exactly via the permalink manual edit.

But @yakuzaemme is right it had to do with the Cyrillic even though both I and the developer tried to manually input the word in questions with ENG turned on the keyboard. Then to copy-paste the word into a text document to get rid of any potential formatting. That's why it was so surprising it didn't help.

However, the issue was resolved rather unexpectedly- the developer re-wrote the whole URL in the permalink manually. Then we updated, cleared the cache and Voila!

What is even stranger is that we published ~10 articles in the last month in English, French, Italian and Turkish and it's the first time we had such an issue. However, the articles were written by different writers, so probably one of them accidentally put a Cyrillic symbol and we took it while copy-pasting from the word doc with the written article.

Thanks for the help guys!