Q:

Handle special characters in crunchbase API?

Does anybody know how to properly define a curl GET in PHP, for receiving data from the crunchbase API (v3.1) when there are special characters like french accents or umlauts?
I've tried replacing obvious characters with their "original forms", like ö -> o or ö -> oe or left them out completely. And of course I tried encoding the part (or the whole url) with IDN, didn't work (w%C3%BCnsche). rawurlecode() also did not work.
Interstingly enough, the official provided api link for the guy below also includes umlauts.
// This is an example name that causes the problem
$name = 'jan-wünsche';
// base url and key
$url = 'https://api.crunchbase.com/v3.1/people/' . urlencode($name) . '? 
user_key=' . $KEY;

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($curl, [
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
    CURLOPT_URL => $url
]);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

Instead of his profile, I get "No Mapping Rule matched".
Does anyone know how encode special chars here with the crunchbase API? Thanks a lot!

A:

I had the same problem, asked Crunchbase support and got this reply:

Thanks for reaching out. Our engineering team is aware of this issue and they plan to incorporate a fix for the future version of the API.
  In the meantime, we do recommend our customers using the UUID instead of the permalinks.

If you have the uuid of the person, that will work in the api call.

