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Just to add to this, the "special characters" are "%E2%80%AE" which is the escaped form of the UTF-8 "Right-To-Left Override" control character (which effectively reverses the display of text).

If you try copying the URL to plain-text, you'll see: http://www.kurlak.com/john/%E2%80%AElmth.ecruos

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Why is this possible? Is there a way to surpress this weirdness? I want to be able to trust my address bar again.

I believe that RTL character is one of the main failures of UNICODE. This should be part of the markup / rich text, not part of the plain text.

Even without the RTL directive, they might have used something like sourcе.html — which contains a non-ASCII glyph. So while RTL is problematic, I'm not prepared to call it a failure in that generally problematic space of unifying human communication.

I use it when I write Hebrew mixed with English...

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