Characters allowed in a URL

Question

Does anyone know the full list of characters that can be used within a GET without being encoded? At the moment I am using A-Z a-z and 0-9... but I am looking to find out the full list.

I am also interested into if there is a specification released for the up coming addition of Chinese, Arabic url's (as obviously that will have a big impact on my question)

Answer 1

EDIT: As @Jukka K. Korpela correctly points out, RFC 1738 was updated by RFC 3986. This has expanded and clarified the characters valid for host, unfortunately it's not easily copied and pasted, but I'll do my best.

In first matched order:

host        = IP-literal / IPv4address / reg-name

IP-literal  = "[" ( IPv6address / IPvFuture  ) "]"

IPvFuture   = "v" 1*HEXDIG "." 1*( unreserved / sub-delims / ":" )

IPv6address =         6( h16 ":" ) ls32
                  /                       "::" 5( h16 ":" ) ls32
                  / [               h16 ] "::" 4( h16 ":" ) ls32
                  / [ *1( h16 ":" ) h16 ] "::" 3( h16 ":" ) ls32
                  / [ *2( h16 ":" ) h16 ] "::" 2( h16 ":" ) ls32
                  / [ *3( h16 ":" ) h16 ] "::"    h16 ":"   ls32
                  / [ *4( h16 ":" ) h16 ] "::"              ls32
                  / [ *5( h16 ":" ) h16 ] "::"              h16
                  / [ *6( h16 ":" ) h16 ] "::"

ls32        = ( h16 ":" h16 ) / IPv4address
                  ; least-significant 32 bits of address

h16         = 1*4HEXDIG 
               ; 16 bits of address represented in hexadecimal

IPv4address = dec-octet "." dec-octet "." dec-octet "." dec-octet

dec-octet   = DIGIT                 ; 0-9
              / %x31-39 DIGIT         ; 10-99
              / "1" 2DIGIT            ; 100-199
              / "2" %x30-34 DIGIT     ; 200-249
              / "25" %x30-35          ; 250-255

reg-name    = *( unreserved / pct-encoded / sub-delims )

unreserved  = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." / "_" / "~"     <---This seems like a practical shortcut, most closely resembling original answer

reserved    = gen-delims / sub-delims

gen-delims  = ":" / "/" / "?" / "#" / "[" / "]" / "@"

sub-delims  = "!" / "$" / "&" / "'" / "(" / ")"
              / "*" / "+" / "," / ";" / "="

pct-encoded = "%" HEXDIG HEXDIG

Original answer from RFC 1738 specification:

Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.

^ obsolete since 1998.