Hi All

I'm not a web developer so I don't quite understand this I got from Chris...

""+" characters in file names could actually cause problems with search queries

The plus (+) is a reserved character (see sec 2.2 of RFC 2396) and is the replacement for a space in Encoded URIs so could cause 404 errors should the replace occur with a flename query."

Can anyone explain why this would cause a problem and would it be better to change the "+"s for either an underscore or dash?

thanks
Dan

all it's saying is that if you name a file "Daniel+Robinson.php" what the browser sees when you place that into the navigation bar is "Daniel Robinson.php", which is pretty sloppy, but technically a correct filename. You could link to a file called Daniel+Robinson.php, but you would need to urlencode it first. A shortcut for doing this in php is with the urlencode function:

PHP Code:

<a href="<?=urlencode("Daniel+Robinson.php")?>">Daniel Robinson</a>

which would output HTML that looks like this:

<a href="Daniel%2BRobinson.php">Daniel Robinson</a>

Dont expect anyone to remember how to type Daniel%2BRobinson.php, however. Dashes and underscores do not need to be urlencoded, and thus are easy to type and remember.

Abel

Thanks for the advice I'll take out all the + and replace with an underscore or dash.

thanks
Dan