Rails - Jul 2006 - Changing default word separator in URLs?

At the moment, if you put a string into parameters in a URL Rails will 
delimit them using +

E.g. The title of a page might be "My Great New Page", Rails maps it 
nicely onto myapp.com/My+Great+New+Page - and then handles this when 
used at the destination action.

Does anyone know if the + character can be swapped for a hypen -, a 
plugin or custom function that overrides the Rails function would be 
ideal. Google seems to regard a hypen as a word separator thus making 
the URLs a little bit more search engine friendly.

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

On Jul 4, 2006, at 12:33 AM, David Smalley wrote:
> At the moment, if you put a string into parameters in a URL Rails will
> delimit them using +
>
> E.g. The title of a page might be "My Great New Page", Rails maps
it
> nicely onto myapp.com/My+Great+New+Page - and then handles this when
> used at the destination action.
>
> Does anyone know if the + character can be swapped for a hypen -, a
> plugin or custom function that overrides the Rails function would be
> ideal. Google seems to regard a hypen as a word separator thus making
> the URLs a little bit more search engine friendly.
The ''+'' is the CGI-escaped version of a space (aka, %20).  I
don''t
think you''ll be able to change this.  From a search-engine  
perspective, however, the <title>, the  <meta
name="description"
content="..." /> and the  <meta name="keywords"
content="..." /> tags
are just as (if not more) important as the URL.

-Rob

Rob Biedenharn		http://agileconsultingllc.com
Rob@AgileConsultingLLC.com