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Topic: Characters in Category Titles |
Jos
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Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 18:50:31 GMT |
I'd prefer using the "and" rather than "&" from now on if we could because the ampersand messes up the URLs for the pages of the directory. Even better would be to keep as one word where possible. The commas and apostrophes also mess up the URLs.
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Jos
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 18:52:36 GMT |
Or maybe later on I could change the system so it translates "&", ",", "'" to other characters for the URL string. It would be kind of complicated, but maybe possible. The best would be the "-" character, but that's already used for system computations.
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CrystalZ
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 18:53:33 GMT |
Ever since we noticed the symbols were messing up I have tried to change them over to "and" instead. And I've eliminated the comma wherever I notice it. Obviously I have missed some or have made a mistake when adding news cats...rest assured it wasn't on purpose or anything  I will continue to fix the cats whem I come across them.
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Lucky Duck Thrift
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Jos
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 18:58:26 GMT |
Okay thanks. I like them much better with the "&" , but I hate messed up URLs. I just hope someday I can fix that so we can start using the "&" all the time for the titles.
I wouldn't change the ones that are already made at this point. We have plenty else to do, and if we change them it will just make a whole bunch of 404s that we can't keep up with at the moment.
Actually I'm not really sure what to do about this, but it is a problem.
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CrystalZ
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 19:29:38 GMT |
So should I just leave the ones we have now?
I'll be sure to put "and" instead of "&" when creating new sub-cats.
SIDENOTE: Let's say I forget but then automatically fix it right afterwards. Would this result in a 404 even though the system hasn't been regenerated between creation and the fix? Or would I be safe if I did that?
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Lucky Duck Thrift
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Jos
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 19:38:22 GMT |
If the HTML pages haven't been regenerated yet, then it won't create a 404.
Maybe I should just fix it somehow so we can go on peacefully, but I already looked at it quite a bit before and didn't come up with a solution. Plus I have the editor cats to program, and I'm trying to catch up on some pending submissions. I'm still back in last October!
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CrystalZ
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 19:49:46 GMT |
It's really not a huge deal at this point in time. Any new editors that come in and get the ability to create their own cats just need to be aware not to use any symbols in the cat names.
There are a lot of other directories that have the rule that one can't use symbols in the actual site title. Which means you are basically calling a site something it isn't. I think that would be a lot worse than the sub-cat thing we have.
It would be nice, I too like the & symbol better, but it isn't a need-to-be-fixed-yesterday type problem, at least I don't think it is.
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Lucky Duck Thrift
Nearly new cds, movies, books, and household goods. Make me an offer I can't refuse!
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Jos
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 21:31:24 GMT |
I think maybe the best way would be to make them be converted to the actual URL encoded characters as they should be rather than the ones with the commas as they have. I'll look into it later and see if that will work. Like described on this site .
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Jos
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 21:43:45 GMT |
Except if I'm reading that right, you can't do that with the ampersand or other characters that are reserved as separators for query strings. I keep thinking there must be some character we can use. It works the way it is now, but the ampersand gets changed to ",038" , which just doesn't look right. Other than that there isn't really a problem with it.
Here's an example URL:
code: http://www.sitelibrary.net/Directory/Regional/Countries/U/United_States/Business_,038_Services/Moving_and_Storage/
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Jos
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 21:45:58 GMT |
Actually that comma is supposed to be encoded I think, so that's not right either the way it is right now. Will keep looking for the right character. (Story of my life! LOL)
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Jos
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 21:49:08 GMT |
Says there "...Only alphanumerics [0-9a-zA-Z], the special characters "$-_.+!*'()," [not including the quotes - ed], and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL."
Would a "+" work to replace the ampersand? I forget, seems there might be something that would have affected in the computations. Will look into it.
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CrystalZ
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 21:54:56 GMT |
No putting a + looks amateurish (no offence). We should leave it as "and" until the "&" can be used.
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Lucky Duck Thrift
Nearly new cds, movies, books, and household goods. Make me an offer I can't refuse!
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Jos
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 21:59:13 GMT |
I don't mean putting "+" in the category titles, but rather using "&" , but instead of the URL getting changed to "Business_,038_Services", for example, it would get changed to "Business_+_Services" or maybe just "Business+Services" .
Seems to me though that there was some reason in the script that I couldn't do that. I spent a lot of time looking for some way to fix this, some months ago, and didn't come up with a character I really liked. We have MySQL to deal with too, so whatever we use has to pass all 3 - HTML, URL encoding, and MySQL database characters. Plus it has to work within the script without messing up any other characters that are used in there.
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CrystalZ
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 22:01:38 GMT |
Oh ok yeah instead of the 038 it would work well with +.
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Lucky Duck Thrift
Nearly new cds, movies, books, and household goods. Make me an offer I can't refuse!
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Jos
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Re: Characters in Category Titles
Posted on 04/09/06 at 23:40:52 GMT |
Ok will look into seeing if that would work then, sometime soon. Hopefully I can find something that won't mess up the whole system!
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