Can a URL have an asterisk?

Question

I notice Wikipedia allows them in their URLs, is it legit or does anyone know where it will give me problems?

Answer 1

As per http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt YES, you can.

...Only alphanumerics [0-9a-zA-Z], the special characters "$-_.+!*'()," [not including the quotes - ed], and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.

refer: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm