How do special characters in a URL work? Are they fake?

Question

I came across a URL with non-Latin characters, featuring Korean glyphs:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/여보세요

Copying it gives me another URL:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EC%97%AC%EB%B3%B4%EC%84%B8%EC%9A%94

What technology is behind this? Is it just Google Chrome browser "magic" or is there indeed some UTF-8 or similar stuff behind it?

Answer 1

Technology behind this is called Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) and it's defined in RFC 3987. It's use in URLs is defined in RFC 3986. Characters are indeed encoded in UTF-8. The "unreadable" form is UTF-8 converted using raw percent-encoding.

Answer 2

The characters will have to be encoded as in your "unreadable" version in order to be properly interpreted by all software.

What must be happening in Chrome is that these are being converted to their Unicode version for display only.