Problem with mod rewrite on friendly URL

[Bluelove]

Hi,

i have rewritten some URLs to be search engine friendly

i use to have product.php?id=XXXX
now i have /product/xxxx_nameoftheproduct

I use mod rewrite to achieve this with
RewriteRule ^{product/([0-9]+)_(.*)} product.php?id=$1 [NE]

All goes fine untill the productname contains special characters as é à ä etc
then i get an error on IE7 and Firefox says it tries to redirect infinitly.

Does anybody has an idea? I tried to google it but nothing helped.

As you can see i don't need the productname it's just for URL building.

Thanks
J

[sneakyimp]

obviously a url with spaces (or line breaks!) or ? or & in it is coming to result in an invalid url. if these links are generated by PHP and are being displayed in your pages, consider using [man]urlencode[/man] on nameoftheproduct before displaying it. Sadly, it will look kind of garbled (which to me defeats the purpose of the friendliness you are striving for) but it should work i think.

[pblancher]

When adding a record to the database for product name, what I do is have a reg-x that creates a URL friendly form of the Product name. What mine does is removes all punctuation, accented characters and so on so that:

Theo's Magic Montréal becomes theos-magic-montreal

Then the URL is easy to search in the database and is friendly for SEO.

Enjoy.

[sneakyimp]

Perhaps you should share the regex code?

[Bluelove]

Yeah, i use a replace to create the friendly url, but it only strips out spaces brackets etc etc, but not special characters like é à etc

(i did see some other sites have é à in their links though)

thanks
J

[Bluelove]

Anybody got another solution besides re-encoding all links and replace é by a regular 'e' ?

thanks

[sneakyimp]

php.net/urlencode