Describe the bug

I'm trying to load files from the public folder containing special url characters like # and ?. While running the app using the dev-server they are not resolved correctly and a "404 Not Found" status is issued.

For instance, trying to load an image at public/my#image.svg with a percent-encoded relative URI like <img src="my%23image.svg" /> fails.
It can't be loaded either with <img src="my#image.svg" /> because then the hash is interpreted as the URL fragment, so there's no way to load the image.

Reproduction

https://stackblitz.com/edit/vitejs-vite-yyarjv8i

Steps to reproduce

Run the repro in devserver mode, and look at the index.html file and its rendered output:

• The red .svg image (without any special character) loads correctly.
• The green and yellow images (containing a # and ? in the filename respectively) don't load and return a 404 not found, where they should load. The devserver doesn't resolve their percent-encoded URIs correctly.
• The blue image (whose filename contains %23) loads correctly when writing in the img src %2523(the percent-encoding of %23), but also if writing %23. So it looks like the devserver resolves the %25 to the character % correctly, but not the %23 to #.

System Info

System:
    OS: Linux 5.0 undefined
    CPU: (8) x64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9880H CPU @ 2.30GHz
    Memory: 0 Bytes / 0 Bytes
    Shell: 1.0 - /bin/jsh
  Binaries:
    Node: 20.19.1 - /usr/local/bin/node
    Yarn: 1.22.19 - /usr/local/bin/yarn
    npm: 10.8.2 - /usr/local/bin/npm
    pnpm: 8.15.6 - /usr/local/bin/pnpm
  npmPackages:
    vite: ^7.1.6 => 7.1.6

Used Package Manager

npm

Logs

No response

Validations

• Follow our Code of Conduct
• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Read the docs.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
• Make sure this is a Vite issue and not a framework-specific issue. For example, if it's a Vue SFC related bug, it should likely be reported to vuejs/core instead.
• Check that this is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion or join our Discord Chat Server.
• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.