URL Routing: Handling Spaces and Illegal Character

Question

I've seen a lot of discussion on URL Routing, and LOTS of great suggestions... but in the real world, one thing I haven't seen discussed are:

1. Creating Friendly URLs with Spaces and illegal characters
2. Querying the DB

Say you're building a Medical site, which has Articles with a Category and optional Subcategory. (1 to many). ( Could've used any example, but the medical field has lots of long words)

---

Example Categories/Sub/Article Structure:

1. Your General Health (Category)
   • Natural Health (Subcategory)
     1. Your body's immune system and why it needs help. (Article)
     2. Are plants and herbs really the solution?
     3. Should I eat fortified foods?
   • Homeopathic Medicine
     1. What's homeopathic medicine?
   • Healthy Eating
     1. Should you drink 10 cups of coffee per day?
     2. Are Organic Vegetables worth it?
     3. Is Burger King® evil?
     4. Is "French café" or American coffee healthier?
2. Diseases & Conditions (Category)
   • Auto-Immune Disorders (Subcategory)
     1. The #1 killer of people is some disease
     2. How to get help
   • Genetic Conditions
     1. Preventing Spina Bifida before pregnancy.
     2. Are you predisposed to live a long time?
3. Dr. FooBar's personal suggestions (Category)
   1. My thoughts on Herbal medicine & natural remedies (Article - no subcategory)
   2. Why should you care about your health?
   3. It IS possible to eat right and have a good diet.
   4. Has bloodless surgery come of age?

---

In a structure like this, you're going to have some LOOONG URLs if you go: /{Category}/{subcategory}/{Article Title}

In addition, there are numerous illegal characters, like # ! ? ' é " etc.

SO, the QUESTION(S) ARE:

1. How would you handle illegal characters and Spaces? (Pros and Cons?)
2. Would you handle getting this from the Database
   • In other words, would you trust the DB to find the Item, passing the title, or pull all the titles and find the key in code to get the key to pass to the Database (two calls to the database)?

note: I always see nice pretty examples like /products/beverages/Short-Product-Name/ how about handling some ugly examples ^_^

Answer 1

I myself prefer _ to - for readability reasons ( you put an underline on it and the _'s virtually go_away ) , if you're going to strip spaces.

You may want to try casting extended characters, ie, ü , to close-ascii equivelants where possible, ie:

ü -> u

However, in my experience the biggest problem with Actual SEO related issues, is not that the URL contains all the lovely text, its that when people change the text in the link, all your SEO work turns to crap because you now have DEADLINKS in the indexes.

For this, I would suggest what stackoverflow do, and have a numeric part which references a constant entity, and totally ignore the rest of the text ( and/or update it when its wrong )

Also, the grossly hericichial nature just makes for bad usability by humans. Humans hate long urls. Copy pasting them sucks and they're just more prone to breaking. If you can subdivide it into lower teirs, ie

/article/1/Some_Article_Title_Here
/article/1/Section/5/Section_Title_Here
/section/19023/Section_Title_here  ( == above link ) 

That way the only time you need to do voodoo magic is when the numbered article actually has been deleted, at which time you use the text part as a search string to try find the real article or something like it.

Answer 2

Solution 2 is the typical approach of those... some refinements are possible, eg. turning apostrophes into nothing instead of a dash, for readability. Typically you will want to store the munged-for-URL-validity version of the title in the database as well as the ‘real’ title, so you can select the item using an indexed SELECT WHERE.

However. There is no actual illegal character in a URL path part, as long as you encode it appropriately. For example a space, hash or slash can be encoded as %20, %23 or %2F. This way it is possible to encode any string into a URL part, so you can SELECT it back out of the database by actual, unchanged title.

There are a few potential problems with this depending on your web framework though. For example anything based on CGI will be unable to tell the difference between an encoded %2F and a real /, and some frameworks/deployments can have difficulty with Unicode characters.

Alternatively, a simple and safe solution is to include the primary key in the URL, using the titled parts purely for making the address nicer. eg.:

http://www.example.com/x/category-name/subcat-name/article-name/348254863

This is how eg. Amazon does it. It does have the advantage that you can change the title in the database and have the URL with the old title redirect automatically to the new one.

Answer 3

I suggest doing what wordpress does - strip out small words and replce illegal characters with dashes (max 1 dash) then let the user correct the URL if they want to. It better for SEO to make the URL configurable.

Answer 4

What I do normally is to allow only legal character and keep the friendly URL as short as possible. Also important is that friendly URLs are often inserted by human, I never generate a friendly URL from title or content, and then use that one to query the database. I would use a column in a table e.g. friendly_url, so that the website admin can insert friendly URLs.

Answer 5

As a follow-up. I do have some ideas. So feel free to comment on the ideas or give your own answer to the question:

Solution #1: Replace all illegal characters with dashes:

• www.mysite.com/diseases---conditions/Auto-immune-disorders/the--1-killer-of-people-is-some-disease/

That looks a little ugly to me...

Solution #2: Strip illegal characters and replace spaces with single dashes:

• www.mysite.com/diseases-conditions/Auto-immune-disorders/the-1-killer-of-people-is-some-disease/

Solution #3 Apply a few rules to replace certain characters with words:

• www.mysite.com/diseases-and-conditions/Auto-immune-disorders/the-number1-killer-of-people-is-some-disease/

Solution #4 Strip All Spaces and use Capitalization

• www.mysite.com/DiseasesAndConditions/AutoImmuneDisorders/TheNumber1KillerOfPeopleIsSomeDisease/

(May not work well on case sensitive servers and is hard to read)

Answer 6

My last approach is:

1. Convert all "strange letters" to "normal letters" -> à to a, ñ to n, etc.
2. Convert all non-word characters to _ (i.e not a-zA-Z0-9)
3. replace groups of underscores with a single underscore
4. remove all tailing and leading underscores

As for storage, I believe the friendly URL should go to the database, and be immutable, after all cool URIs don't change