: Accented characters representation in the URL We have support for various languages in our website, including Spanish, French and Swedish. For now, the links in the site are NOT encoded before

@Kevin317

According to Google:


Yes, we can generally keep up with UTF-8 encoded URLs and we’ll
generally show them to users in our search results (but link to your
server with the URLs properly escaped). I would recommend that you
also use escaped URLs in your links, to make sure that your site is
compatible with older browsers that don’t understand straight UTF-8
URLs.


So encoding your URLs seems like it would be search engine friendly. But your best bet may be to just remove those special characters and replace them with the "non-special" alternatives. This StackOverflow answer shows some awesome code for doing that:


Try these functions:

<?php
function Slug($string, $slug = '-', $extra = null)
{
return strtolower(trim(preg_replace('~[^0-9a-z' . preg_quote($extra, '~') . ']+~i', $slug, Unaccent($string)), $slug));
}

function Unaccent($string)
{
return html_entity_decode(preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(?:acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);~i', '', htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
}
?>


And use it like this:

<?php
echo Slug('Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn of Glaño'); // internationalizaetion-of-glano
?>


You can embed the Unaccent() code into the Slug() function if you
wish to have only one function.

Vote Up Vote Down