title: Turn off URL manipulation in AngularJS
body: <p>I'm trying to write my first web-app with Angular.</p>
  
  <p>In the normal mode (html5Mode off), Angular forces the address's hash part to look like a "path" (adding a leading "/"), and encodes special characters - for example, it allows a single "?" and "#" in the hash and replaces the others with %3F and %23.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to turn this feature off? I don't want to use the <em>$locationProvider</em> / <em>$routeProvider</em> features - I want to parse the hash myself (In my case, the user's will enter some "free text" in the hash to search inside my website).</p>
  
  <p>I read that the routeProvider cannot be configured to use regular expressions...</p>
  
  <p>If htmlMode is turned on, then the address's hash part is not forced to look like a path (no leading "/"), but it still encodes special characters.</p>
  
  <p>I'm aware that some browsers might encode/escape the special characters anyway, but if the user managed to enter some special characters in its address bar then I don't want to change it.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>