weird characters in the url

[eluser]dianikol85[/eluser]
here is the situation

i have a search form and when i submit it i add the variables in the url in order to have the pagination according to the search results. So far so good.

Because i am from Greece i need to pass greek characters, see an example

Code:

http://df.loc/admin/user/index/u_id/asc/search_by_name=τεστ

The value after the search_by_name keyword is greek.

but when i echo the url it prints

Code:

http://df.loc/admin/user/index/u_id/asc/search_by_name=CF84CEB5CF83CF84

so i can't execute successfully the sql query in my model because of these weird chars.

My collation are utf-8 and the charset utf8 also


Any suggestions to produce 'τεστ'