special characters in URL

[Guest]

I have a FTP shared with friends where we upload underground music albums and then we use the links to share the downloads in a music forum. Problem is that the album names are in french so there is a lot of special characters in the name

So the URL looks like *http://www.mydomain.com/downloads/Some Band - En français avec des caractères spéciaux (2013) [7'' EP].zip*

For me it works perfectly and i can download the file by using this URL but i have read everywhere that special chars are bad in URL.
Is there any reason why i MUST remove the special characters or encode the URL ?
Is everyone able to access an URL with special characters or some older browsers won't be able to download the file ?

I really don't care about SEO or anything else. I just want the download links to work for everyone.

Since the files are uploaded through FTP i can't use PHP to remove the special chars with regex so i really don't know what to do.

[requinix]

You generally don't need to because browsers will do it for you, but that's only because websites don't always do it themselves. So you should try to.

 

$file = "Some Band - En français avec des caractères spéciaux (2013) [7'' EP].zip";
echo "<a href='http://www.mydomain.com/downloads/" . htmlentities(urlencode($file)) . "'>Download</a>";

urlencode() because you're putting something into a URL, then htmlentities() because you're putting that into HTML.