What characters are allowed in Shopify product handles?

Question

Shopify's documentation shows some of the characters that are allowed in product handles (the product identifier that is used in URLs).

Since handles are used for your storefront navigation for products, collections, blogs and pages, they must use alpha-numeric characters (a-z, 0 to 9) without accents (such as umlauts, and other diacriticals), nor characters such as @ or # etc., and no spaces. Spaces will be converted to hyphens, other characters may be stripped entirely or converted to an equivalent standard ASCII character.

But if I create a product in the web interface with the title 'a b-c_d.e' then the handle generated by Shopify is 'a-b-c_d-e'. It seems like underscores are allowed, but spaces and dots are converted to hyphens.

What is the full set of characters allowed in product handles?

Answer 1

I wrote a script to test if the Shopify API accepts each of the ASCII codes from 0 to 127 in a product handle. It tries to modify the handle of an existing product to xCxC where C is the ASCII character to test and x is literally the letter x. I did it this way to find out how each character is handled when surrounded by text and also when trailing at the end of the handle.

Here are the results:

Allowed:

• 0-9
• a-z
• A-Z (will be converted to lowercase)
• _ (underscore)

Allowed when surrounded but removed when at the end of the string:

• - (hyphen)

Converted to - (hyphen) when surrounded but removed when at the end of the string

• space
• ! # $ % & * + , . / : ; < = > ? @ \ ^ ` { | } ~
• ASCII control codes 0 to 32

Removed

• " ' ( ) [ ]

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See Wikipedia for details on each ASCII code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

Answer 2

The accepted answer is outdated.

Shopify allows many non-english characters inside URLs.

Example

https://example.myshopify.com/collections/무료/products/이지부

is now a valid Shopify URL.