Valid characters for directory part of a URL (for short links)

Question

Are there any other characters except A-Za-z0-9 that can be used to shorten links without getting into trouble? :)

I was thinking about +,;- or something.

Is

Answer 1

According to RFC 3986 the valid characters for the path component are:

a-z A-Z 0-9 . - _ ~ ! $ & ' ( ) * + , ; = : @

as well as percent-encoded characters and of course, the slash /.

Keep in mind, though, that many applications (not necessarily browsers) that attempt to parse URIs to make them clickable, for example, may support a much smaller set of characters. This is akin to parsing e-mail addresses where most attempts also don't catch all addresses allowed by the standard.