Why can't magento support unicode encoded urls for downloadable links?

Question

I'm running the latest magento1.9.x

I am attempting to use a webservice call to create a downloadable link to a url similar to http://dev-nffiles.somesite.org/folder/Temp/9781554132_NurseMgr%27sBookForSaleStuff.mobi

Anytime I pass a url with percent encoding, I get a response "url_not_valid".

Assume I have xdebug and phpstorm, and I have a pretty good understanding of the zend framework, but i'm not going to step through magento core code for an hour. I feel like magento should support unicode percent encoding.

Can anyone recommend how I can get this to work? Its honestly out of the question to get the department creating the links to not do things like use apostrophes or spaces in the filenames.

Answer 1

Nevermind. I found this stupid nugget of code in the validator

public function validateUrl(&$var)
    {

        if (is_string($var) && strlen($var) > 0) {
            $urlregex = "/^(https?|ftp)\:\/\/([a-z0-9+\!\*\(\)\,\;\?\&\=\$\_\.\-]+(\:[a-z0-9+\!\*\(\)\,\;\?\&\=\$\_\.\-]+)?@)?[a-z0-9\+\$\_\-]+(\.[a-z0-9+\$\_\-]+)*(\:[0-9]{2,5})?(\/([a-z0-9+\$\_\-]\.?)+)*\/?(\?[a-z\+\&\$\_\.\-][a-z0-9\;\:\@\/\&\%\=\+\$\_\.\-]*)?(#[a-z\_\.\-][a-z0-9\+\$\_\.\-]*)?$/i";
            if (!preg_match($urlregex, $var)) {
                throw new Exception('url_not_valid');
            }
        } else {
            $var = '';
        }
    }