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I am trying to put a hyperlink in a MS Word document using MS Word 2007 which links to a URL that includes curly brackets ('{', '}') and ampersands ('&'). Word 2007, however, does not allow these characters. Nor does it allow percent signs ('%') either, so I cannot URL encode these characters.

Any suggestions on how to link to a URL which includes special characters? Specifically curly brackets and ampersands?

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I happen to have old word on my machine... I just manually typed test.com/%lol and then highlighted it... pressed ctrl+K for link... clicked OK. It allowed it. – CreeDorofl Apr 6 '11 at 11:12
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You should be able to using the "Insert/Edit Hyperlink" window, which you can get to by pressing

Ctrl + K.

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If you add the curly braces through this, when you go back into the Edit Hyperlink window, you'll see they've been converted to %7b and %7d.

Also, for what it's worth, Word 2007 is properly converting the text to links for me, when I type in http://www.test.com/{one}&{two}.

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You are correct. MS-Word 2007 does allow special characters (including curly brackets and ampersands). It just has a validation regex that the URL did not comply when it had curly brackets and ampersands. Those were the only characters I removed before the URL validated, leading me to believe that they were the sole cause of the invalidation instead of the URL in its entirety. To make the problem even worse, MS-Word 2010 validated the URL which MS-Word 2007 did not. – Ethan T Apr 9 '11 at 2:08
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