converting url sperators with slash - php

Question

I have a category named like this:
$name = 'Construction / Real Estate';
Those are two different categories, and I am displaying results from database
for each of them. But I before that I have to send a user to url just for that category.
Here is the problem, if I did something like this.
echo "<a href='site.com/category/{$name}'> $name </a>";
The URL will become
site.com/cateogry/Construction%20/%20Real%20Estate
I am trying to remove the %20 and make them / So, I did str_replace('%20', '/', $name);
But that will become something like this:
site.com/cateogry/Construction///Real/Estate
^ ^ and ^ those are the problems.
Since it is one word, I want it to appear as Construction/RealEstate only.
I could do this by using at-least 10 lines of codes, but I was hoping if there is a regex, and simple php way to fix it.

Answer 1

You have a string for human consumption, and based on that string you want to create a URL.
To avoid any characters messing up your HTML, or get abuses as XSS attack, you need to escape the human readable string in the context of HTML using htmlspecialchars():
$name = 'Construction / Real Estate';
echo "<h1>".htmlspecialchars($name)."</h1>;
If that name should go into a URL, it must also be escaped:
$url = "site.com/category/".rawurlencode($name);
If any URL should go into HTML, it must be escaped for HTML:
echo "<a href='".htmlspecialchars($url)."'>";
Now the problem with slashes in URLs is that they are most likely not accepted as a regular character even if they are escaped in the URL. And any space character also does not fit into a URL nicely, although they work.
And then there is that black magic of search engine optimization.
For whatever reason, you should convert your category string before you inject it as part of the URL. Do that BEFORE you encode it.
As a general rule, lowercase characters are better, spaces should be dashes instead, and the slash probably should be a dash too:
$urlname = strtr(mb_strtolower($name), array(" " => "-", "/" => "-"));
And then again:
$url = "site.com/category/".rawurlencode($urlname);
echo "<a href='".htmlspecialchars($url)."'>";
In fact, using htmlspecialchars() is not really enough. The escaping of output that goes into an HTML attribute differs from output as the elements content. If you have a look at the escaper class from Zend Framework 2, you realize that the whole thing of escaping a HTML attribute value is a lot more complicated
No, there is nothing you can do to make it easier. The only chance is to use a function that does everything you need to make things easier for you, but you still need to apply the correct escaping everywhere.

Answer 2

You can use a simple solution like this:
$s = "site.com/cateogry/Construction%20/%20Real%20Estate";
$s = str_replace('%20', '', $s);
echo $s; // site.com/cateogry/Construction/RealEstate

Answer 3

Perhaps, you want to use urldecode() and remove the whitespace afterwards?