Home/ Questions/Q 8350975
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-09T08:29:15+00:00

I got a big sitemap created dynamically with PHP, it has a sitemap index

  • 0

I got a big sitemap created dynamically with PHP, it has a sitemap index with some 230 separate sitemaps, and each individual sitemap has between 3.000 and 15.000 URLs.

In most of those 230 sitemaps, everything is ok, but in some of them some URLs contain special characters and Google returns an error, does not accept such sitemap. The example of a normal, accepted URL:

http://www.site.com/Gentofte-Greve/Denmark 1 Badmintonligaen/12-fe-juice_a-1091627-1-33-1-odds/

The example of an URL which corrupts the entire sitemap file for Google:

http://www.site.com/Team%20%C5rhus%20Elite-Solr%F8d%20Strand/Denmark 1 Badmintonligaen/12-fe-juice_a-1091631-1-33-1-odds/

Any special character, for example the Nordic ones, will wreck the sitemap. Here is an example of Nordic characters: http://www.borgos.nndata.no/alfabet.htm

My questions is – HOW do I code those special characters (and other similar ones) so sitemap still checks out fine. Which PHP coding function do I use if that’s a solution? Is the only solution to use str_replace and replace those characters with normal ones? It wouldn’t be an issue, the URL works no matter what you write in the first part of it as that part is for SEO only, but this would be time-consuming. I’d prefer to be able to write those special characters in a way which doesn’t wreck the sitemap for Google.

Everything else regarding my sitemaps is fine, they’re coded in UTF-8 or at least they should be with this line:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Are the %C5 and %F8 sequences meant to represent the characters U+00C5 (Å) and U+00F8 (ø)? If so, you need to use their UTF-8 encodings, not their raw Unicode codepoint numbers. ‘Å’ should be %C3%85, and ‘ø’ should be %C3%B8.

    For more information about URI encoding, see RFC 3986.

    Doing this in PHP is complicated by the fact that PHP strings are really byte strings, not Unicode character strings. They can’t store abstract Unicode characters; they can only store the encoded representation of those characters, in a particular encoding such as UTF-8 or UTF-16. You can use the mbstring extension to work with encoded Unicode strings, but doing this correctly will probably mean using the mbstring functions for all handling of Unicode text throughout your application.

    You should be looking to fix this encoding problem at the source: how did your program get a string that contains the byte 0xC5 to represent the character U+00C5? Something, somewhere, must’ve assumed that Unicode codepoint numbers translate directly into bytes, which is wrong. Find and fix that, so that your data is read into the PHP string in UTF-8 form to begin with, and then use the mbstring functions for any manipulation of the string afterward.

    Once you have a string that contains the UTF-8 representation of your URL, rawurlencode() should give you the correct percent-escaped result.

    • 0