Allow percent encoded characters in repo name/path

Description

I'm trying to import a large set of repos into gitlab and some of them have '++' in the name as they're c++ wrappers of other modules. This is code shared with an external company so it adds extra friction to having to change the repo names as we still need to sync back with them.

Proposal

As a workaround for situations like mine could we allow percent encoded characters in the repo path? Ideally these could be rendered to ascii/unicode when displaying as the name on the web interface but would allow reliable conversion when importing repos with any character in the name.

API use could either require users to pre-quote names, or could do it for them with a warning in the response stating the url created. Web interface could convert for the user, ideally with a warning stating that the name was changed accordingly.

References

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt

Documentation blurb

  1. Gitlab only allow url safe characters for the repo name / path.
  2. For situations where repos need to be created with other charaters, these should be percent encoded as per the URI spec (rfc3986)

During implementation, this can then be copied and used as a starter for the documentation.)