IIS 7.5 URL Rewrite encoding

Question

I have following rewrite rule in web.config:

<rewrite>
  <rules>
    <rule name="Search" stopProcessing="true">
      <match url="^search/(.+)$" />
      <action type="Redirect" url="?q={R:1}" />
    </rule>
  </rules>
</rewrite>

It works fine both on IIS Express 8.0 and IIS 7.5 on Azure Websites for urls like /search/test (only ascii characters) - redirects to /?q=test. But for urls with unicode characters (/search/тест or /search/%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82) on IIS 7.5 on Azure Websites redirects to /?q=теÑÑ‚ (or /?q=%C3%91%E2%80%9A%C3%90%C2%B5%C3%91%C2%81%C3%91%E2%80%9A) instead of /?q=%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82. It works correctly on IIS Express 8.0.

Answer 1

You should use the internal {UrlEncode:{}} function to properly encode the characters that are invalid in the URL (e.g. UTF-8 characters). So replace the URL part with: url="?q={UrlEncode:{R:1}}".