How do I include special characters in a path alias? I'm trying to add a path alias for a node, /student-&amp;-courses/maths, but in the URL it is displayed as www.testone.com/student-%26-courses/maths.
I unchecked the Generate automatic URL alias option manually set the path alias without adding a pattern. I enabled the Reduce strings to letters and numbers and Transliterate prior to creating alias options in the settings, but it doesn't have any effect: The special characters are not encoded in ASCII format.
How can I fix this so the URL contains special characters?
The ampersand (&amp;) is a reserved character in URLs because it is usually input as part of the query string.  Some more info.
Most special characters can be used in URLs with the settings you described in your question, but &amp; is an exception.  Either just live with %26 as the encoding or rewrite the title to not use the &amp; symbol, which is reserved.
This is not a Pauthauto problem; it's a URL problem.