Question

i’m having a database which is storing geo-data like countries, cities.
i would like to use modrewrite with links like:
mysite.com/europe/austria/vienna

now the problem: in german, some countries contain umlauts like austria = österreich
(i can’t use umlauts in urls)

so my question:
is there a way to create a function inside the database which replaces all special characters when querying like “where validUrl(country)=’oesterreich’ ?
which would replace ö->oe

my only idea so far is adding an extra database field for modrewrite which would hold “oesterreich”

any ideas? thanks

Answer 1

You can create a function in MySQL like so

DELIMITER $$

CREATE FUNCTION UmlautRaus(input varchar) RETURNS varchar
BEGIN
  declare output varchar;

  SET output = REPLACE(input,'ü','ue');
  SET output = REPLACE(output,.....
  ....
  RETURN output;
END $$

DELIMITER ;

However as @GolezTrol said, this is not a great idea because of diacritics in other languages.

Link: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/string-functions.html