Cannot redirect with ñ character in short URL even though MySQL stores it

[paulgailey]

So if a testing.php script validates spanish characters...
and I've edited my database Collation to be utf8mb4_spanish_ci througout
and chatgpt made a sanitising YOURLs plugin to allow spanish characters,
and modify the htaccess to allow all such variants
and all plugins and yourls are upto date
and i'm running php 8.3
and i've set php_value mbstring.internal_encoding UTF-8 in htaccess
and i tried setting mbstring in php.ini but could only access local value not master
and the special characters are displaying OK in the database and as keywords in the YOURLs admin area...

WHY is YOURLs failing to resolve a URL with special characters in it?

What more do I need to do as the issue seems to be the code and not the server configuration

I've searched the plugins, the issues here, and the web and remain puzzled.

Guidance greatly welcome .

[paulgailey]

Debugged with AI (don't lol/at me!) (ChatGPT and Claude, dev chrome AI tools) and the conclusion:

"The consistent output from https://gailey.es/test.php?url=%C3%B1 confirms that the server and PHP properly handle URLs containing special characters like ñ. However, the issue persists in YOURLs, which suggests a problem with its handling of encoded/decoded characters during the redirection process."

Several sanitize redirect plugins and htaccess tweaks have proved unsuccessful.

Surely international users of YOURLs have managed this, am I really the first to try this?

[paulgailey]

fwiw...i have managed to hack a solution so far (to allow accented chars and mixed normal and dots in the short url), however it currently demands one plugin, core modification to yours-loader, and custom htaccess rules. I'm trying to consolidate the plugin and the core mod into a single plugin and preserve the core.