UTF-8 filenames and URLs

(running WHM 11.38.2 on CENTOS 6.4 x86_64)
I have a file (on a local windows machine) called ò.txt
If I upload it via FTP to cpanel, I see the name correctly in the FTP listing.
In ssh, I see it listed as \362.txt but it's actually correctly named, i.e. if I type
#rm "ò.txt"
the file gets deleted.

This file is not accessible as http://example.com/ò.txt, but only when percent-encoded (http://example.com/%f2.txt)

I know that these characters are not in the standard for URLs, but I am migrating several sites with HTML containing references to images with accented names and I don't want to have to edit all of them

Plus, in other cases I see this can be done, and the percent-encoded URL is just a graphical variant of the UTF-8 URL (i.e. you can type both versions and you'll get the same file)

Is there a way to allow the user to see the accented form too in cpanel?

 

I think I made some progress.

I have the same file ( ò.txt ) uploaded via FTP to two different servers
(allr urls entered as CODE to avoid interferences, else the forum chenges them!!)

1) Non Cpanel server
The file is accessible as

Code:

www.domain.it/%C3%B2.txt

If you type the accented url, the url gets encoded by the browser and everything works:

Code:

http://www.domain.it/ò.txt

So far, everything is ok

2) Cpanel server
The same file is only accessible with another encoding, namely

Code:

www.domaintoo.it/%f2.txt

The fact is, if the user types the ò.txt form, the browser will encode it as %C3%B2.txt, not %f2.txt, and the request will therefore fail:

Code:

www.domaintoo.it/%C3%B2.txt

It seems Cpanel is using ISO-8859-1 to decode URLs, not UTF-8

Where can I change this setting?

I have already tried implementing what is suggested here : http://forums.cpanel.net/f185/cant-get-utf-8-default-charset-352911.html#post1418721 (but of course using AddDefaultCharset UTF-8), with no effect

 

Actually, I think the AddDefaultCharset directive has probably nothing to do with my issue, as it changes the encoding of the responses the server gives, not of the requests it receives.

any other pointer?

 

more detail:

1) This is what gets typed in the browser

Code:

http://www.example.com/ò.txt

2) These are the headers as seen by Live http headers

Code:

GET /%C3%B2.txt HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: it-IT,it;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

3) This is what is seen in the access log

Code:

84.253.135.183 - - [31/Aug/2013:16:10:32 +0200] "GET /%C3%B2.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0"

4) This is the error log

Code:

[Sat Aug 31 16:10:32 2013] [error] [client 84.253.135.183] File does not exist: /home/example/public_html/\xc3\xb2.txt

Am I wrong in supposing the problem is between steps 3 & 4 ?
I.e., apache gets a request to an UFT-8 percent-encoded file, but does not correctly decode it?

 

thanks,
ticket # is 4336315