CODEWITHSUNDEEP
language-agnosticseofriendly-url
Sruly
Sruly

Reputation: 10540

What char should I use to replace illegal characters in a url slug

I noticed that various systems use various characters as the replacent for illegal ones in urls.

Is there a reason to use one or the other or should I just pick the one that looks best to me

The options I have seen so far include: - _ + and simply removing all illegal characters.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 742

Answers (4)

Dean Rather
Dean Rather

Reputation: 32384

Just use - for space and get rid of the illegal chars (like this site is).

Also it's all lower-case.

Upvotes: 3

Jacco
Jacco

Reputation: 23759

Leaving out characters can make really strange strings. Really strange strings do not help for SEO.

The 'prettiest' solution is to transliterate your non-ascii characters to their ascii-equivalent. This can be done using Iconv (if you are on a unix platform)

You could also take a look at: How to handle diacritics (accents) when rewriting ‘pretty URLs’

But that is a PHP-specific question

Hope this helps

Upvotes: 1

Nick Berardi
Nick Berardi

Reputation: 54854

My preference is "-" and I use a very simple RegEx to replace everything that I don't want.

[^a-zA-Z0-9\-]*

This will replace any non alpha numeric characters and dash characters with a dash.

Upvotes: 1

Fredrik Mörk
Fredrik Mörk

Reputation: 158309

I would personally use _ to replace illegal characters and - for space. One other option would be to simply remove the illegal characters.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions