title: is it almost a standard that web applications assume the query string to be in UTF-8?
body: <p>when we type in or paste it to a browser's address bar:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%A4%A9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%A4%A9</a></p>
  
  <p>i think there is no way to tell whether the encoding is UTF-8 or any other encoding, so the application will usually assume it is UTF-8.  So is it entirely up to the app to interpret it as whatever encoding it wants to or assumes to be?</p>
  
  <p>(for all websites and even the platform i worked on, they seems to be almost always UTF-8)</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update:</strong> changed to the webapp instead.</p>