Problem in displaying a URL slug with dash

Question

I made a slug with dash for my stories URLs such as:

Fetching records with slug instead of ID

This is my code to create slug :

function Slugit($title) {
    $title = strip_tags($title);
    // Preserve escaped octets.
    $title = preg_replace('|%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])|', '---$1---', $title);
    // Remove percent signs that are not part of an octet.
    $title = str_replace('%', '', $title);
    // Restore octets.
    $title = preg_replace('|---([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])---|', '%$1', $title);


    $title = remove_accents($title);
    if (seems_utf8($title)) {
        if (function_exists('mb_strtolower')) {
            $title = mb_strtolower($title, 'UTF-8');
        }
        $title = utf8_uri_encode($title, 500);
    }

    $title = strtolower($title);
    $title = preg_replace('/&.+?;/', '', $title); // kill entities
    $title = str_replace('.', '-', $title);
    $title = preg_replace('/[^%a-z0-9 _-]/', '', $title);
    $title = preg_replace('/\s+/', '-', $title);
    $title = preg_replace('|-+|', '-', $title);
    $title = trim($title, '-');


    return $title;
}

As you can see dashes, up to here, everything is fine. But when I click on the link, it can not open and find it my database as it's saved in normal and with no dashes.

So I wrote something to remove dashes:

$string = str_replace('-', '&nbsp;', $string);

But when there is ? or . in URL, then it can not display!

Any help to retrieve back the original URL?!

view my answer here stackoverflow.com/questions/2955251/…

Imran Omar Bukhsh
– Imran Omar Bukhsh

2012-04-28 03:36:09 +00:00
Commented Apr 28, 2012 at 3:36 — Imran Omar Bukhsh
– Imran Omar Bukhsh, Commented Apr 28, 2012 at 3:36

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:26:28Z

8

When you have an URL such as this one :

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2647789/problem-in-displaying-a-slug-with-dash

The problem-in-displaying-a-slug-with-dash part is not quite important : it's just nice :

to display
for users to read, and see what the question's about
for search engine, as a SEO mecanism.

What's really important, in that URL, is the 2647789 part : it's the identifier of the question in the database -- i.e. it's that part of the URL that's used to load the question.

This means there is no need to convert the slug to what was first typed by the user : only thing that matters is that you pass the identifier of your data in each URL, and use it to find your data back.

And, if you want some kind of proof : try going to Problem in displaying a URL slug with dash without the slug : you'll see that your question loads just fine ;-)

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:26

CommunityBot

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answered Apr 15, 2010 at 18:05

Pascal MARTIN

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6 Comments

Joshua Over a year ago

Not only is it not important, it's ignored! You can view http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2647789/this-is-NOT-the-title just fine! :)

Mac Taylor Over a year ago

problem is here i used no identifier : so u r saying there is no way to find original url back ? because wordpress is doing so , but i cant find out how !?

Pascal MARTIN Over a year ago

@Mac : if you really don't want to store an identifier, you could use the "clean" URL as an identifier : store the "clean" URL as an additionnal field in your DB, and use that field to get your data back.

Mac Taylor Over a year ago

thanks , one more question , why this site doesnt use slash at the end of urls but wordpress does so , is it important ?

Pascal MARTIN Over a year ago

You're welcome :-) ;;; no, I don't think the final / is important at all -- well, maybe wordpress expects it, but, in this case, it's a choice made by wordpress' team, and not fixed by some kind of standard.

|

Gumbo · Accepted Answer · 2010-04-15 18:13:02Z

0

If you don’t have an numeric ID and use just the slug to identify the record in your database. Then you could simply store the slug in the database too and query it with that slug.

answered Apr 15, 2010 at 18:13

Gumbo

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