Rules for converting product title to URL

[mikejdavies]

We are considering the automated export of product information for the purposes of creating some bespoke applications.

Does anyone know the logic behind converting the product title to the final pagename.html?

There is a thread about how actinic handles characters in the product reference, but what about restrictions on length, etc?

e.g. (

becomes _28
) becomes _29
+ becomes _2b
, becomes _2c
- becomes _2d
. becomes _2e
/ becomes _2f
; becomes _3b
< becomes _3c
> becomes _3e

Can anyone help?

[RuralWeb]

Does anyone know the logic behind converting the product title to the final pagename.html

Its one of actinics key SEO features

[leehack]

I don't think there is that many rules tbh, a dash (-) can remain, all spaces get turned into underscores as do punctuation marks. The worst one it does IMO is if you have 'space dash space' as it converts that to _-_, where I would prefer just an underscore instead of those 3 characters.

[fergusw]

I read your question slightly differently:

The rules for this are based on URL Percent Encoding for browsers with an underscore replacing the % symbol.

In terms of length there are loads of examples (in fact I think there was a competition) to find the longest URL. Usual suspects were the
_copy_of_copy_of_copy_of__copy_of__copy_of_copy_of_copy_of_copy_of__copy_of__copy_of__copy_of__copy_of__copy_of__copy_of__copy_of_original_page.html

i can't remember the limit of the top of my head. I think it is only defined by the db field size; either 255 chars or 65,000 chars (text or memo)

[mikejdavies]

What exactly are the SEO features? Do you know the logic behind this?

The length of the product title appears to have an effect, with some titles being used in their entirety, whilst others being cut off.

Anyone actually know the exact logic so I could write a PHP script to convert the product title to the exact URL filename that Actinic will generate?

[leehack]

What exactly are the SEO features? Do you know the logic behind this?

The length of the product title appears to have an effect, with some titles being used in their entirety, whilst others being cut off.

Anyone actually know the exact logic so I could write a PHP script to convert the product title to the exact URL filename that Actinic will generate?

The page name is directly correlated to the product name and therefore the keywords for that product automatically, that's the SEO feature. I think you'd need an exact answer off actinic to cover all bases, depends how strange your names are. You could always do as much as you know and then run a Xenu check. You'd get most of if not all of the rules by just trying the typical characters.