Question

I am having a problem trying to understand functions with variables. Here is my code. I am trying to create friendly urls for a site that reports scams. I created a DB full of bad words to remove from the url if it is preset. If the name in the url contains a link I would like it to look like this: example.com-scam.php or html (whichever is better). However, right now it strips the (.) and it looks like this examplecom. How can I fix this to leave the (.) and add a -scam.php or -scam.html to the end?

functions/seourls.php

/* takes the input, scrubs bad characters */
function generate_seo_link($link, $replace = '-', $remove_words = true, $words_array = array()) {
  //make it lowercase, remove punctuation, remove multiple/leading/ending spaces
  $return = trim(ereg_replace(' +', ' ', preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '', strtolower($link))));

  //remove words, if not helpful to seo
  //i like my defaults list in remove_words(), so I wont pass that array
  if($remove_words) { $return = remove_words($return, $replace, $words_array); }

  //convert the spaces to whatever the user wants
  //usually a dash or underscore..
  //...then return the value.
  return str_replace(' ', $replace, $return);
}

/* takes an input, scrubs unnecessary words */
function remove_words($link,$replace,$words_array = array(),$unique_words = true)
{
  //separate all words based on spaces
  $input_array = explode(' ',$link);

  //create the return array
  $return = array();

  //loops through words, remove bad words, keep good ones
  foreach($input_array as $word)
  {
    //if it's a word we should add...
    if(!in_array($word,$words_array) && ($unique_words ? !in_array($word,$return) : true))
    {
      $return[] = $word;
    }
  }

  //return good words separated by dashes
  return implode($replace,$return);
}

This is my test.php file:

require_once "dbConnection.php"; 


$query = "select * from bad_words";
$result = mysql_query($query);


while ($record = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) 
{
    $words_array[] = $record['word'];
}



$sql = "SELECT * FROM reported_scams WHERE id=".$_GET['id'];
$rs_result = mysql_query($sql);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($rs_result)) {

$link = $row['business'];

}


require_once "functions/seourls.php";
echo generate_seo_link($link, '-', true, $words_array);

Any help understanding this would be greatly appreciated 🙂 Also, why am I having to echo the function?

Answer 1

Your first real line of code has the comment:

//make it lowercase, remove punctuation, remove multiple/leading/ending spaces

Periods are punctuation, so they’re being removed. Add . to the accepted character set if you want to make an exception.