Utf-8 url get with curl - unicode

Question

i am trying to visit some urls with non latin characters using curl, the problem is when i visit i get no response. My browser has no problem visiting them, i checked out the string transformations and it seems i am visiting
"http://www.linkedin.com/pub/j-rgen-a-tr-ff/7/606/68a"
while my browser visits
"http://se.linkedin.com/pub/j%C3%B6rgen-a-tr%C3%A4ff/7/606/68a"
How do i convert that string so the curl succeeds?
function hitFormGet($loginURL, $loginFields, $referer,$cookieString)
{
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookies.txt");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookies.txt");
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, true);
//curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE,$cookieString);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1 );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, 'gzip,deflate,sdch');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $loginURL.$loginFields);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $referer);
//curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $loginFields);
$ret = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $ret;
}
$res=hitFormGet("http://se.linkedin.com/pub/j%C3%B6rgen-a-tr%C3%A4ff/7/606/68a","","","");

Answer 1

It looks like you are visiting linkedin from Sweden. That's why you are redirected to se.linkedin.com. To convert URL as expected you can apply urlencode() on your dynamic url part as in your example on: j-rgen-a-tr-ff/7/606/68a.
It should work.