non-ansi characters in generated url's

Friday 09 November 2007 2:49:04 pm

Hi!

I've just installed ez 3.10.0, and I'm having some trouble with norwegian characters. I've created a folder named Tilbehør, and the generated url is http://somedomain.com/Tilbehør, which is then of course translated by the browser to /Tilbeh%F8r, which doesn't exist. If I however rewrite the url by hand back to /Tilbehør, it's translated to /Tilbeh%C3%B8r, and that works. Seems to me to be some sort of UTF-8/ISO-8859-1 problem. The site it self is encoded in ISO. I've been screwed over by PHP and UTF-8 so many times now, I'm not doing that again.

Any ideas how to fix this?

Also, while we're on the topic, is it possible to have ez generate lowercase url's?

-Erlend

Wednesday 28 November 2007 1:22:39 am

Hi Erlend,

I'm glad you found a solution which worked for your site. In 3.10.0 and in the 4.0.0 alpha and beta releasees, the default url transformation setting have been urlalias_iri, which as you've seen will include unicode characters in the generated urls.

For the final release of eZ Publish 4.0 and 3.10.1 we are considering changing the default to a more restrictive setting. Either 'urlalias_compat', or 'urlalias'

Do you, and the rest of the community have any wishes in this regard?

For reference I am including a snippet from the feature documentation:

1. Only allow a restricted set of characters in the url, this means
   a to z, numbers and underscore. (This is the same behaviour as in
   3.9 and earlier.)

   The identifier for this is *urlalias_compat*

2. Allow more characters in the url, but still restrict it to the
   ASCII characters (with a few exceptions). Capitalization of words
   are now kept.

   The identifier for this is *urlalias*

3. Similar to #2 but allow all Unicode characters (with a few
   exceptions). This allows the text to preserved as much as possible
   and is highly recommended for uni- or multi-lingual sites. The only
   changes to the text is removal of a few characters which are
   special to the urls on the Internet and trimming of multiple
   whitespaces to only one whitespace.
   It is recommened to use the utf-8 charset for the site when having
   this enabled (*i18n.ini*).

   The identifier for this is *urlalias_iri*

When the desired transformation is chosen it must be configured in
*site.ini* by setting the TransformationGroup setting in the settings
*group URLTranslator to contain the identifier of the chosen type.
e.g. if the third type was chosen::

  [URLTranslator]
  TransformationGroup=urlalias_iri

Advanced users might also want to take a look at *transform.ini* to
configure your own transformation group. Tweaking this file and adding
an extension to the transformation allows for full control over the
created URL aliases.

Note: #3 is referred to as IRI [1] (Internationalized Resource
      Identifiers) which is a specialization of URI/URL with Unicode
      support.

[1] http://www.w3.org/International/O-URL-and-ident.html

--
Ole Marius Smestad
Lead Engineer eZ Publish
Member of the Community Project Board

Wednesday 28 November 2007 3:25:25 am

I can't really say I cared much for the unicode url's, as as soon as they are clicked the characters are converted to percentage encoded %g%a%r%b%a%g%e. This makes them hard to read, type, say, and remember. If one could come up with a solution where the generated url's contained only ansi characters, while still supporting utf-8 characters in the url (for instance for use in printed material) that would be the best solution in my opinion.

Update: Re-reading my own response, I see that this is exactly what urlalias does :) Now, if only I could get rid of those capitalized letters..