Why does Git have a 'Check ✓' mark in its querystring?

Question

I was searching about something on Git when I noticed that in the query string, there's a parameter utf8 and its value is ✓! Not utf8=yes or utf8=true.

The full URL is following in Chrome and Firefox:

https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/search?utf8=✓&q=browser&type=

But following in IE:

https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=browser&type=

So it seems to be a way of detecting the encoding scheme for the URL, but does anyone know for sure? Also, aren't there any simpler ways of doing this?

Answer 1

From a StackExchange question:

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=true then this wouldn't trigger the UTF-8 encoding in these browsers. This is a hack/feature of Rails (which Github is built with) to force IE to submit UTF-8 text.

It's a feature of Rails (which GitHub is built with), although it's not specific to Rails.