I'm considering buying a car. So I thought why not make a web-crawler in *Mathematica* to pile-up car data? Brilliant idea.
Then I found this Greek website, [gocar.gr](http://www.gocar.gr), which just so happens to have all the data I need in a convenient form, with URLs following a very consistent progression:

```
www.gocar.gr/cars/BRAND/MODEL/EDITION

```

e.g. `www.gocar.gr/cars/OPEL/MOKKA/1.7_CDTi_Edition_/`.

The problem is when the model or edition contains Greek letters (but not the brand? Oh wait, there *are no* Greek car brands), e.g. `www.gocar.gr/cars/BMW/ΣΕΙΡΑ_3/`, in which case `Import["URL", "Data"]` fails with a `FetchURL::conopen` error.

It seems to me that this is some kind of encoding problem (it's consistent with Greek characters appearing in the URL and everything else works).
I've seen the -kind of- relevant questions about copying non-Unicode text ([this](https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/6263/copying-greek-text-from-notebooks-as-unicode) and [this](https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/1137/how-to-copy-as-unicode-from-a-notebook)), but my problem is staying **within** *Mathematica*, not copying something out of it (which, by the way, works fine).

**So, to reproduce:**

```
Import["http://www.gocar.gr/cars/BMW","Data"]

```

works, but 

```
Import["http://www.gocar.gr/cars/BMW/ΣΕΙΡΑ_3","Data"]

```

doesn't.

And my question is: any ideas?

**Additional info:** 

1. This is a Windows 7 / 64-bit computer; formats and location are set to Greek/Greece, Greek keyboard is installed (duh), display language is set to English, *Mathematica* version 8.
2. I also tried going directly through the JLink with a Java module I found in some other post (can't find it right now; may credit go where credit is due):

```
Needs["JLink`"]

httpGet[url_String] :=JavaBlock @
Module[{http, get}, 
       http = JavaNew["org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient"];
       get = JavaNew["org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.GetMethod", url];
       http @ executeMethod[get]; get @ getResponseBodyAsString[]]

```

followed by: 

```
ImportString[httpGet[URL - HERE], {"HTML", "Data"}]

```

No luck.

Thank you for reading my rant.