One of the most amazing features of ASP.NET MVC is its powerful routing engine that let you define clear URLs for your web application. Today I want to share a very simple and short tip with you to handle non-English URLs in your ActionLink methods.

Let’s start with an example; in a blog engine we have two routes as follows:

routes.MapRoute(

                "ShowPost",

                "read/{url}",

                new { controller = "Post", action = "Show" }

            );

routes.MapRoute(

                "EditPost",

                "edit/{url}",

                new { controller = "Post", action = "Edit" }

            );

and you decide to show a Persian title in a URL as follows: /blog/read/این-یک-عنوان-است

Everything is fine till now but if you want to put an ActionLink in your view to redirect user to edit page in this way:

<%= Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", new { url = Model.Url }) %>

You will be redirected to an ugly encoded URL like this /edit/%D8%AA%D8%B3%D8%AA instead of /blog/edit/این-یک-عنوان-است

Here’s the simple trick to overcome this:

<%= HttpUtility.UrlDecode(Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", new { url = Model.Url })) %>

That’s it!