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I've noticed that a lot of websites, when searching or just browsing, will add a get variable called utf and set it equal to a check mark (?utf8=✓).
Two examples are:
Dotabuff has its search URL include it. Example: dotabuff.com/search?utf8=✓&q=PPD
Bibme also has its search URL include it. Example: bibme.org/mla/website-citation/search?utf8=✓&q=someurl.com
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UTF-8 is used by 97.7% of all the websites whose character encoding we know.
Since ASCII bytes do not occur when encoding non-ASCII code points into UTF-8, UTF-8 is safe to use within most programming and document languages that interpret certain ASCII characters in a special way, such as / (slash) in filenames, \ (backslash) in escape sequences, and % in printf.
UTF-8 is an encoding system for Unicode. It can translate any Unicode character to a matching unique binary string, and can also translate the binary string back to a Unicode character. This is the meaning of “UTF”, or “Unicode Transformation Format.”
UTF-8 is a valid IANA character set name, whereas utf8 is not. It's not even a valid alias. it refers to an implementation-provided locale, where settings of language, territory, and codeset are implementation-defined.
URIs contain utf8=✓ to force the client to send UTF-8.
It works because the key-value-pair (which is ignored by the target) contains a unicode-only character.
From Is the use of “utf8=✓” preferable to “utf8=true”?:
By default, older versions of IE (<=8) will submit form data in Latin-1 encoding if possible. By including a character that can't be expressed in Latin-1, IE is forced to use UTF-8 encoding for its form submissions, which simplifies various backend processes, for example database persistence.
If the parameter was instead
utf8=truethen this wouldn't trigger the UTF-8 encoding in these browsers.
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