Forward Slashes convert to hyphens in post slugs

[alxndr]

In slugs for taxonomies or post permalinks, slashes (/\) and ampersands (&) are stripped out. More useful URLs would be created by turning slashes into hyphens, and ampersands into the word "and".

e.g.:

"songs by Lennon/McCartney"
expected slug: "songs-by-lennon-mccartney"
actual slug: "songs-by-lennonmccartney"

"Us & Them"
expected slug: "us-and-them"
actual slug: "us-them"

[alxndr]

replaces slashes with hyphens in post title slugs and taxonomy term slugs; replaces ampersands with "and" and "&c" with "etc" in post title slugs

[alxndr]

This patch doesn't extend the ampersand fix to category/tag slugs (but the slash fix works). Perhaps ampersands are being stripped out before the title hits sanitize_title_with_dashes() ? I haven't dug around enough yet...

[scribu]

Agree with the slash replacement.

Don't agree with the & replacement due to internationalization problems: if you write a blog in french, you won't want '&' to be replaced with 'and'.

[alxndr]

Oh right. ('and') perhaps?

[alxndr]

Arg... that should have been

__('and')

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: #10823

[SergeyBiryukov]

We already have __(' and ') string in .pot from wp_sprintf_l(), so we probably can use it here.

[blogbuzz]

How can I force to use the slash in the url? I want to use a slash in my post url, but when I save my custom slug in the post editor it gets stripped out. Should be possible cause there are situations were you want to use slashes.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: #20338

[GhostToast]

Any traction on this? Particularly involving the forward slash "/" not being converted into a dash/hyphen "-", I have long thought this behavior odd, as it defaults to slugs which are unreadable. Are there any instances where hyphen would not be desired in place of a slash?

[F J Kaiser]

Replying to SergeyBiryukov:

We already have __(' and ') string in .pot from wp_sprintf_l(), so we probably can use it here.

I'm not too sure how someone would react if they got a site where the internal language is defined to be Korean, but the post is written in English. Example Title:

Me & her spent a wonderful weekend together

URL after the patch converted & to __('and') and therefor to Korean: 와

http://my-korean-blog.kr/me-와-her-spent-a-wonderful-weekend-together

Very sure that it would be better to simply replace an ampersand with a dash.

[GhostToast]

convert forward slash to hyphen

[nacin]

I agree with the slash (only). I can never remember how this works — is this safe to change without affecting existing slugs? Seems like.

Unit tests would be great.

[GhostToast]

I have tested various configurations of saving/pending/draft/publish and have found the following:

• If a title Computers/Robots was saved prior to my patch, it's slug computersrobots remains unchanged despite various publish/unpublish status changes (unless intentionally edited).
• If a title Computers/Robots is pending for publish, and auto-slug generation occurs, computers-robots is assigned. Manually editing this slug back to computersrobots if desired, will be honored, despite any publish/save/unpublish status changes.
• If a title Computers/Robots has been published with the patch, it's slug becomes computers-robots until manually edited.

This all seems to be working as intended.

[jtsternberg]

I have some unit tests for this which cover the use of &c, &c., &, and /. Are we saying we DON'T want to convert ampersands to 'and'? If not, are saying it should instead replace with a hyphen? I'll upload my diff as-is (including the unit-test) so you can test it out.

[jtsternberg]

Covers the use of &c, &c., &, and /. Includes unit tests and patch.

[corvidism]

Hi,
the slash-to-hyphen part of this is something I would really appreciate getting fixed - I'm maintaining several sites with a lot of pages named "2012/2013" and the like, and the disappearing forward slashes are causing some seriously ugly slugs. ("2012/2013" --> "2122013-2")

How can I help? I have no experience with working on WP Core, but I definitely can do manual testing or run unit tests if that's necessary.

[miqrogroove]

To move this forward, let's see some tests, and let's make sure multiple slashes or spaces never convert into multiple hyphens. I'm in favor of jtsternberg's idea to convert ampersand to a hypen rather than to strip, assuming we are not dealing with HTML encoded strings.

[corvidism]

Replying to miqrogroove:

To move this forward, let's see some tests, and let's make sure multiple slashes or spaces never convert into multiple hyphens. I'm in favor of jtsternberg's idea to convert ampersand to a hypen rather than to strip, assuming we are not dealing with HTML encoded strings.

Okay, lets see.
I tried to apply the jtsternberg's patch, but that failed: there were some other changes made to formatting.php since then and the patched file doesn't even pass the current unit tests.
I did, however, get to work the earlier patch by GhostToast, the one that only adds the "forward slash to dash" functionality. I wrote a bunch of unit tests for multiple slashes and positions, so it seems to be safe.
So... what now?
IMO replacing "&" to "-and-" or "&c." to "-etc-" is wrong, because it ignores languages other then English. Should we replace it with a dash, too?

[crysman]

+1 here, I wish this bug was fixed soon at last, too! I cannot develop currently, but if you need some tests, I might run some...

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to corvidism:

IMO replacing "&" to "-and-" or "&c." to "-etc-" is wrong, because it ignores languages other then English. Should we replace it with a dash, too?

Yes, let's replace a standalone ampersand (not a part of an HTML entity) with a hyphen as well.

[corvidism]

Replying to SergeyBiryukov:

Replying to corvidism:

IMO replacing "&" to "-and-" or "&c." to "-etc-" is wrong, because it ignores languages other then English. Should we replace it with a dash, too?

Yes, let's replace a standalone ampersand (not a part of an HTML entity) with a hyphen as well.

That's the current way of dealing with them, so no more coding or testing needed :) I think this might be done then!
Now... I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do. Oops. :B I removed the needs-unit-tests tag, and tagged this dev-feedback - if I'm messing up, somebody please correct me.

[crysman]

Hello, I just want to know how it's goin' on in here? Will the patch be implemented? The slashes bug is a real pain!

Moreover, I do not think it's "enhancement", I consider it a bug. Making 20122013-2 out of 2012/2013 makes no sense at all.

Thanks

[Zurd]

bump... just came across this 7 years old SEO bug. It's an easy fix, replace / with -

Like people said, don't use "and" as it's not multi-language friendly.

[swissspidy]

Seems like we can build upon 10792.diff​ and 10792-only-slashes-w-unittests.diff​ to properly replace slashes and ampersands with hyphens.

[corvidism]

The recreated patch.

[corvidism]

I recreated the old patch (including the unit tests). What else do I need to do to get this actually commited this time?

[swissspidy]

Thanks, @corvidism! It looks like additions and removals are reversed in your patch, i.e. there's more red than green in 10792.patch​. Plus, 10792-only-slashes-w-unittests.diff​ seems to have a few tests for slashes as well that could be included.

[corvidism]

patch with correct direction

[corvidism]

Replying to swissspidy:

Thanks, @corvidism! It looks like additions and removals are reversed in your patch, i.e. there's more red than green in 10792.patch​. Plus, 10792-only-slashes-w-unittests.diff​ seems to have a few tests for slashes as well that could be included.

Ooops, yeah, sorry about that - I followed the instructions on ​https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/contribute/git/ and they're wrong (they do the diff in the wrong direction).

I used all those tests from 10792-only-slashes-w-unittests.diff, though, they're in the fixed patch.

[swissspidy]

#41718 was marked as a duplicate.

[SergeyBiryukov]

In 41318:

Formatting: In sanitize_title_with_dashes(), convert forward slash to hyphen on save.

Props corvidism, jtsternberg, GhostToast, alxndr.
Fixes #10792.