Multisite Permalinks creates broken URL's with special characters

IIRC / is a ‘reserved’ character in the slug and cannot be used.

That’s a general WP issue, not MultiSite. I also can’t think of ways to ‘auto-fix’ that. You’d have to go to each post and edit the slug :/

Ha! That’s only a last-resort-solution with over 5.000 posts.

It also happens with characters like ! and ‘ so not only the /
And this problem only occurs on my imported articles. When I create a new one, it generates a good slug.

So maybe I can perform a query in SQL that finds all url’s that have these reserved characters and replaces them by valid things? Only I wouldn’t know how to write this.

I’ve never tried (ow, 5000!)

If possible, I’d dump the posts (all of ’em) and see if you can re-import with ‘clean’ URLs. If not….

WHAT FOLLOW IS ALL UNTESTED THEORY!!!!

This post on “Transliterate existing cyrillic slugs (post_name) in wordpress” may help: https://snipplr.com/view/50246/transliterate-existing-cyrillic-slugs-postname-in-wordpress/

So you’d want something like

$iso = array(
   "!"=>"-","/"=>"-"
  );

And so on.

Hey Ipstenu,

Thanks for your help. I couldn’t fix it yet though.. I know the basic SQL query but the special characters give errors. This is what I got thusfar:

update wp_posts set post_name = replace(post_name, ‘find this string’, ‘replace found string with this string’);

As I found out, the slug is in the post_name field in wp_posts.
The only thing I need to know is how insert those special characters into the ‘find this string’ part. If I insert a ‘ then it gives me this error: #1064 – You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ”a€?, a€?-a€?)’ at line 1

I think it’s because your quotes are ‘smart’ quotes…

update wp_posts set post_name = replace(post_name, 'find this string', 'replace found string with this string');

Do you mean that I didn’t fill in the string? The actual queries I’m trying are like this:

update wp_posts set post_name = replace(post_name, ‘:’, ‘-‘);

Or

update wp_posts set post_name = replace(post_name, ‘?’, ‘-‘);

Now I don’t know what ‘smart’ quotes mean.
Hey and thanks for helping me this much, really appreciate it!! ??

Smart Quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark_glyphs

And … you have to use special kinds of quotes in various places here…

AND since WordPress’s form will EAT those quotes, read this: https://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,405739,405745#msg-405745

That’s the specific kind of quotes you’ll need ??

You’re totally right! Thanks!! I’m able to do everything I need now.

+1 for you.

Glad to help! ??