What char should I use to replace illegal characters in a url slug

Question

I noticed that various systems use various characters as the replacent for illegal ones in urls.

Is there a reason to use one or the other or should I just pick the one that looks best to me

The options I have seen so far include: - _ + and simply removing all illegal characters.

This question seems to summarize the issue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/270570/special-characters-in-url — Thomas Watnedal, May 18 '09 at 13:11

Dean Rather · Accepted Answer · 2009-05-18T23:05:43.240

3

Just use - for space and get rid of the illegal chars (like this site is).

Also it's all lower-case.

edited May 18 '09 at 23:05

answered May 18 '09 at 12:58

Dean Rather

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 18 '09 at 12:56

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I would personally use _ to replace illegal characters and - for space. One other option would be to simply remove the illegal characters.

answered May 18 '09 at 12:56

Fredrik Mörk

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Thanks for the quick reply. Is there a reason you would do it this way or is it just a personal preference? – Sruly May 18 '09 at 13:00
Using - for space seems to be rather common (as seend here at stackoverflow.com and in several blog engines). Regarding _ (or removal) for illegal characters it's only personal preference. – Fredrik Mörk May 18 '09 at 13:03

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 18 '09 at 13:10

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My preference is "-" and I use a very simple RegEx to replace everything that I don't want.

[^a-zA-Z0-9\-]*

This will replace any non alpha numeric characters and dash characters with a dash.

answered May 18 '09 at 13:10

Nick Berardi

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score 1 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 09:57

Leaving out characters can make really strange strings. Really strange strings do not help for SEO.

The 'prettiest' solution is to transliterate your non-ascii characters to their ascii-equivalent. This can be done using Iconv (if you are on a unix platform)

You could also take a look at: How to handle diacritics (accents) when rewriting ‘pretty URLs’

But that is a PHP-specific question

Hope this helps

What char should I use to replace illegal characters in a url slug

4 Answers4