Want to put unicode characters in your event URLs? Eg Chinese characters like 中文, or even emojis like ? ? ?? As of Event Espresso 4.9.66 you can!
Before pull request 635, we were technically handling these characters correctly (we were percent encoding them), but it seems WordPress has a bug that was preventing these URLs from working properly. So we’re instead, technically, creating IRLs for now- that is, URLs with unicode characters in them. We checked the code, and WooCommerce and Custom Post Types UI plugins both do the same thing: whatever unicode characters you enter into the custom post type slugs get left intact (ie, not percent-encoded).

When you enter your the desired slug for the custom post type slugs (eg a replacement for events), we do at least run sanitize_title() on it, which makes sure it’s a string that can be used in URLs. So we’ll help event managers to not use totally invalid URLs.

So feel free to try to use any crazy characters you like in your URLs. Event Espresso will strip away the bad ones, and leave only valid ones. Just be aware that while putting emojis in your URLs might be fun, it’s also not a great idea to have potential attendees trying to manually enter emojis into address bars ?.