Can't grab string from URL with special characters - php

Question

I have a database in UTF8 unicode ci collation that stores values with special chars like:
oukaïmeden
I want to be able to form urls like:
example.com/oukaïmeden
or
example.com/index.php?id=oukaïmeden
In index.php I set the HTML charset as UTF8 (not that it matters pre output), and save the PHP file as UTF8 unicode ci.
However, no matter what I do, I cannot see to get the string in the form oukaïmeden so I can use it to search the database.
$aparams = explode("/", $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]);
extract($_GET);
$id = utf8_decode($aparams[1]);
echo $id;
echo urldecode($id);
echo utf8_decode($id);
echo utf8_encode($id);
I get values like:
ouka%C3%AFmeden
oukaïmeden
I thought my question was "how can I get the string to show the umlaut so I can use it to search/compare etc?" But actually I wonder if I should be searching differently as well?

Answer 1

URLs cannot contain non-ASCII characters. The URL must look like this first and foremost to be correct:
example.com/index.php?id=ouka%C3%AFmeden
That's the correct percent-encoded representation of the UTF-8 encoded word "oukaïmeden". The browser may or may not show this as "oukaïmeden" in your address bar, but the actual URL must be as above.
In PHP, reading this from $_GET will give you the already decoded value. So, to get the UTF-8 encoded string in your PHP script:
$id = $_GET['id'];
Yup, that's it. Nothing more needed.

Answer 2

Here is the output using the so the correct to use is the "utf8_encode"
$id = $_GET['id'];
$id = utf8_decode($id);
echo $id."<br />";
echo urldecode($id)."<br />";
echo utf8_decode($id)."<br />";
echo utf8_encode($id)."<br />";
ouka�meden
ouka�meden
ouka?meden
oukaïmeden