conversion of accented characters

how to do it?

[starec]

If I have a non English site, how do I form dynamic urls from the db records that contain accented characters? Do I have to define some replacement rules character by character, or there are some standards already set and I just need to find them and use them?

[Macguru]

Wich DB is it?

[starec]

mysql 3.22.32

[Macguru]

Since you have a pretty standard DB format I wish someone can point you at some existing tool to convert all those accented caracters. I can't since I dont know much about mysql. Wich language is it?

[rencke]

There must be some sort of standardized solution to this. Every single European language except English has this problem. I had it in a site search once, where the DB contained numerous names of people and places containing ü, å, ä and ö. A programmer solved the whole thing with on or two lines of Perl. Let me see if I can get some expert in here to answer this.

You know about the problems with spiders and dynamic url:s, of course?

[Bolotomus]

I don't see what the problem is, you just have to %-escape the characters right?

Like, if some funky foreign character is a character hex(D8) then you'd say %D8 in your URL, right?

Whether or not the SEs will rank your pages higher because of the "keyword-is-in-the-URL" rule, I don't know.

[Macguru]

A lot of spiders are specifically programmed to run away from such special caracters.

[Macguru]

Starec, could you put field names and record ID in URL?

[sugarkane]

> standards already set

Both Perl and PHP have modules / functions to do this, if they're the language you're using to retrieve the records.

Perl:

use URI::Escape;
$newstring=uri_escape("foobär");

PHP:

$newstring=urlencode("foobär");

In both cases, $newstring would be set to foob%E4r

The commands to reverse this are uri_unescape() and urldecode() respectively.

[starec]

Sugarcane, great, that's exactly what I was looking for.

Bolotomus, keywords in url help in most of the search engines. Also, it makes the urls more intuitive for the users. What do you prefer more, a url time.com/12,252,14 type or cnn.com/scandals/clinton_levinsky.htm type? :)

Rencke, I have dynamic urls of /category_id/widget_id.htm so the there is no problem with spidering. The new ones will be /category_name/widget_name.htm. Thanks!

[rencke]

Thanks sugarkane for helping out with this. You are my hero!

Sugarkane is moderating the Server sided scripting forum [webmasterworld.com] here at WebmasterWorld. If you have a particularly baffling problem, he is your man.