Question

I am coding a site and have key words in the URLs like this:

?s=2010%20Federal%20Spending&id=115

The Part that has the title “2010 Federal Spending” is not used for navigation; it is completely ignored by my site’s navigation. My site just pays attention to the ‘id’, not the ‘s’. Again, the title is just there for SEO reasons.

Is there a PHP function to clean up this portion of the URL? For example, replace the ‘%20’ with ‘-‘ or something similar?

Answer 1

Use urldecode($your_string) in case you’d like to decode URLs. Since space is not a valid URL character, maybe you should try to replace the spaces in the title before you even use it as an address.

$mytitle = "2010 Federal Spending";
$fixedtitle = str_replace(" ", "_", $mytitle);
echo $fixedtitle;

You could also remove other CHARS that might cause some problems such as “&”

$mytitle = "2010 Federal Spending";
$invchars = array(" ","@",":","/","&");
$fixedtitle = str_replace($invchars, "_", $mytitle);
echo $fixedtitle;