[eluser]umbungo[/eluser]
Are there any recommended ways to handle the use of non alpha-numeric characters for use in urls re: SEO in a reversible way??
My situation; I have several (sub)categories with characters such as ()-&, etc, which will be used in URLs. The URLs will also be used to get that information for use again eg. in database.
I had been using url_title() and then using str_replace('-',' ', $from_url), but this loses all non alpha-numeric characters.
Now, i can eliminate some of them such as replacing '&' with 'and'.. but i really do need some of them; notably the dash.. SO, what I am currently doing is to URL encode;
Code:
//url encode
$for_url = str_replace(' ', '-', str_replace('-', '--',$for_text));
//url decode
$for_text_from_url = str_replace('#', '-', str_replace('-', ' ', str_replace('--','#', $from_url)));
This would mean a category like 'half-life 2' would give a URL of example.com/half--life-2. Would this work OK for SEO etc? ie. google searching 'half-life 2' would pick up that URL optimally? [note: not actual category]
Or, is there a better way of doing this?? There are many categories and subcategories so using an array to convert between urlName=>textName would not be ideal.
Thanks in advance!
