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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T17:01:06+00:00

I don’t know how to ask this, and I don’t know what it is

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I don’t know how to ask this, and I don’t know what it is called either so I’ll just describe what I want to achieve.

In the database, some articles’ title originaly has spaces:

my title with spaces

But in the url, spaces are replaced by other characters such as plus sign (+) or underscore (_)

http://www.mydomain.com/mycontroller/myaction/my_title_with_spaces

or

http://www.mydomain.com/mycontroller/myaction/my+title+with+spaces

Now, how do you do that in C#? Or is there any helper in ASP.NET MVC that can do something like that?

Let say we achieved the said URL, is there any risk that two unique titles become the same in the URL? Please consider these titles:

Title's
Titles

after parsing, they became the same

Titles
Titles

This will be a problem when retrieving the article from the database since I’ll get two results, one for “Title” and one for “Title’s”.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would implement that functionality like this:

    1. When creating a new article, generate the URL representation based on the title.

    Use a function that converts the title for a suitable representation.
    For example, the title “This is an example” might generate something like “This_is_an_example”.

    This is up to you. You can create a function that parses the title with rules you define, or use an existing one if it suits better your problem.

    2. Ensure the URL representation is unique

    If it’s going to be an ID, it must be unique. So, when creating new articles you must query your database for the resulting URL representation. If you get a result from the database, it means the newly created article generated the same representation as one of the already created articles. Add something to it so it remains unique.

    This could be something like “This_is_an_example_2”. In this case, we added the “_2” to the end of the generated representation so it differs from the already existing one. Once more, with each change you have to ensure this representation remains unique.

    3. Save the created ID in the database, along with the article data

    In the database be sure to save the “This_is_an_example” ID and relate it to the article. Maybe even as the table primary key?

    4. Query the database for the correct article

    Now, about showing a site visitor the correct article:
    When a visitor asks for the following resource, for example:

    http://www.mydomain.com/mycontroller/myaction/this_is_an_example_2

    Extract the URL part that identifies the article, in this case “this_is_an_example_2”.

    When you have that, you have the identifier of the article in the database. So, you can query the database for the article with the “this_is_an_example_2” ID and show the article’s content to the user.

    This might involve some URL rewriting. Unfortunately I’m unable to help you with that in asp.NET. Some search on the subject will surely help you.

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