PHP SEO Functions - php

Question

I am having a problem trying to understand functions with variables. Here is my code. I am trying to create friendly urls for a site that reports scams. I created a DB full of bad words to remove from the url if it is preset. If the name in the url contains a link I would like it to look like this: example.com-scam.php or html (whichever is better). However, right now it strips the (.) and it looks like this examplecom. How can I fix this to leave the (.) and add a -scam.php or -scam.html to the end?
functions/seourls.php
/* takes the input, scrubs bad characters */
function generate_seo_link($link, $replace = '-', $remove_words = true, $words_array = array()) {
//make it lowercase, remove punctuation, remove multiple/leading/ending spaces
$return = trim(ereg_replace(' +', ' ', preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '', strtolower($link))));
//remove words, if not helpful to seo
//i like my defaults list in remove_words(), so I wont pass that array
if($remove_words) { $return = remove_words($return, $replace, $words_array); }
//convert the spaces to whatever the user wants
//usually a dash or underscore..
//...then return the value.
return str_replace(' ', $replace, $return);
}
/* takes an input, scrubs unnecessary words */
function remove_words($link,$replace,$words_array = array(),$unique_words = true)
{
//separate all words based on spaces
$input_array = explode(' ',$link);
//create the return array
$return = array();
//loops through words, remove bad words, keep good ones
foreach($input_array as $word)
{
//if it's a word we should add...
if(!in_array($word,$words_array) && ($unique_words ? !in_array($word,$return) : true))
{
$return[] = $word;
}
}
//return good words separated by dashes
return implode($replace,$return);
}
This is my test.php file:
require_once "dbConnection.php";
$query = "select * from bad_words";
$result = mysql_query($query);
while ($record = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
$words_array[] = $record['word'];
}
$sql = "SELECT * FROM reported_scams WHERE id=".$_GET['id'];
$rs_result = mysql_query($sql);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($rs_result)) {
$link = $row['business'];
}
require_once "functions/seourls.php";
echo generate_seo_link($link, '-', true, $words_array);
Any help understanding this would be greatly appreciated :) Also, why am I having to echo the function?

Answer 1

Your first real line of code has the comment:
//make it lowercase, remove punctuation, remove multiple/leading/ending spaces
Periods are punctuation, so they're being removed. Add . to the accepted character set if you want to make an exception.

Answer 2

Alter your regular expression (second line) to allow full stops:
$return = trim(ereg_replace(' +', ' ', preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\.\s]/', '', strtolower($link))));
The reason your code needs to be echoed is because you are returning a variable in the function. You can change return in the function to echo/print if you want to print it out as soon as you call the function.