Characters that should not be in an URL

[web directory]

What characters should not be in an URL? I have always thought that an URL should only have alphanumeric charaters (numbers and letters). But with my directory and the way that it is built, some funny characters have crept in and I have to remove them. So I was just wondering how it would affect the rankings in SE with odd characters in the URL like : and '.

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You don't have to remove anything.

You can use urlencode() in php

[web directory]

Yeah, I thought that you may say that. I was going to use it but wanted more control, so I started my own function to remove the unwanted characters...

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This could be slower than urlencode.

If you finally do this, maybe you can make your own function which will also use urlencode

I would stick with alphanumerics, hyphens, underscores, and forward slashes, although I think a search engine can crawl any character, so long as it can load for you.

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