[SOLVED] What are the "rules" about using special characters in page titles?
 

I created a sub-sub-level page with the name "Nøsting" and all seemed good. I published the page as normal, it showed up in the menu bar as a drop-drop-down, but when I clicked on it Firefox reported that the page could not be found.

I went back to editing the page in the WP Dashboard and noticed the "ø" was not appearing happily in the slug so substituted a plain lowercase "o" and suddenly the page could be found and loaded normally.

I now notice that the Permalink appears as: "http://www.hatchtown.com/tools/misc-tools/nosting"

So, I'm VERY happy! At the top of the page AND on the dropdown menu the title still shows as "Nøsty", but it's plain "nosty" behind the scenes.

I will be happier if I understand what characters are allowed / not allowed and what are the workarounds for using them.

When you first created that page, did you let Wordpress create the page slug automatically, or did you create it manually by putting nøsting there?

Because Wordpress should automatically strip special characters from page slugs / URLs.
http://support.wordpress.com/pages/page-title-url/

Anything that is not A-Z, a-z, 0-9 should be considered a special character

Hello Flynn!

I don't know, maybe I've discovered a bug in 2.71.

To test the whole thing scientifically I went over to my fun/test site http://www.shepherdjim.com/ and created a new page called "Løwwws". Wanting to re-create what I did before I saved the page as a draft, re-loaded it, added a sentence and then Published it.

The Permalink at the top of the page shows as:
"Permalink: http://www.shepherdjim.com/fiber-tools/spindles/løwwws"

BUT, and this probably important, if I plain-text copy (CTRL-C) that Permalink the result is:
Permalink: http://www.shepherdjim.com/fiber-tools/spindles/løwwwsløwwws"

When I switch to "Quick Edit" the page, the Slug shows:"l%c3%b8wwws"

I switched Firefox tabs and loaded the homepage. "Løwwws" shows up in both the left sidebar and dropdown menu bar menus. Clicking on neither gets me to "Løwwws"

I've left things in that state so you can see what's happening.

I'm guessing/hoping that if I go in and change the Slug to "lowwws" it and the Permalink will be corrected and the page will be accessible.

Bug?

It is entirely possible that certain characters of certain languages are not covered. The transformation is done in wp-includes/formatting.php


If you google for "[name of language] wordpress page slug" you might find a plugin that fixes this. There is one i.e. for islandic

http://tech.einaregilsson.com/2007/0...ss-permalinks/

Okay. I went back in and edited the Permalink, substituted a plain "o" for the "ø". Checked, and sure enough, the slug also now showed as "o". It took a couple of page reloads for the new URL to work its way into the system, but the browser now finds the page.

It's really very acceptable. On the page and on the menus the page name still shows as "Løwwws" So I'm getting the desired "effect" of using the internationally elegant spelling. It would only be if someone tried to manually type in a URL and used the "ø" that there'd be a problem.