How to replace + with hyphen (-) in URL with urlenocde

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I have stored the product names in database with spaces. For example Bike 86, Washing Machine etc.
After using urlencode URL comes to browser as below

http://www.example.com/product.php?productname=Washing+Machine

But I want to get it such like

http://www.example.com/prodcut.php?productname=Washing-Machine

How can I change the urlencode function that it encode the space into hyphen(-) not into "+" sign.

If it is not possible with urlencode then how can I do that.

Note: Please give me some other solution rather than str_replace();

Posted 31-Oct-11 21:45pm

rashidfarooq

Updated 1-Nov-11 2:52am

Yvan Rodrigues

v3

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Yvan Rodrigues · Answer 1 · 2011-11-01T02:51:00

It's a bit more complicated than that.

The + in the URL has a special meaning. The web server will interpret it as a space. These days it is considered best practices to encode space in its hex form e.g. http://www.example.com/product.php?productname=Washing%20Machine which follows RFC 3986 standards, but the + will be around for a long time and is still supported by all browsers and servers.

You want to replace the + with -. You can't do that (even with str_replace) because whereas + means the same thing as space, - doesn't. It just means -.

It is still possible though, but not in PHP. You will need to configure the web server to rewrite any - signs that it sees to spaces before it looks for the file. On Apache you would most likely create a file called .htaccess in the root directory of your site and it would contain something like:

RewriteEngine on

# Replace the minus character in incoming URLs with a space.
RewriteRule ^([^-]*)-([^-]*-.*) $1%20$2 [N] 
RewriteRule ^([^-]*)-([^-]*)$ /$1%20-$2 [L]