[SOLVED] How to remove symbols from database

[Prodigal Son]

I'm a bit stuck on how to properly do this. I use a get variable to determine the page that is loaded from database values. I.e. if you have mysite.com/hello, I will pick up the variable 'hello' and look for that title in my database and then fetch the related data. For more than one word I am using the title as the url and removing spaces and replacing them with dashes. So if I had a database title of "good morning" I could have mysite.com/good-morning. Then when I get the variable I would replace the dash with a space. This works fine.

 

The problem I have is how to deal with punctuation or symbols. If I have "that's awesome" stored as the title I would display the text like that, but for the url I would strip out the apostrophe, so the url would be mysite.com/thats-awesome instead. But when its time to load that page, it will try to select "thats awesome" from the database and won't find it. The only thing I can think of is stripping out the symbols from mysql as I select it, but is that possible? Or what other options are there?

 

Thanks.

[derekmcd]

This is a problem that I know a few people have had

 

You may need to modify the database table to have a new field called "urltitle" or something and that way you can populate this directly from the title when a page/post is created then you can use that in your URL and MYSQL statements.

 

You will be able to use the value in a URL like this

SELECT title FROM pages WHERE urltitle = 'thats-awsome'

 

so the value of title can have all the characters you need and in this case can return "That's Awsome", no need to replace dashes or anything. Depending on the size of the table this migh be some work, as with any changes like this i sugest you make a backup first.

[Prodigal Son]

Oh hmm, what I thought of was having a column called title_symbols. And I would have the "thats awesome" (no apostrophe) as the title and in title_symbols I would have "that's awesome" Anything that didn't have a symbol would just have a null value. But I thought it would be weird and improper to set up the database like that... But I didn't think of just having url titles for all titles, your way seems pretty good, the replacing and removing dashes can get annoying at times. Takes a little more space, but I think its worth the trade off.