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.