# A link without a question mark

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-link-without-a-question-mark/92833>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [April 24, 2007, 9:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-link-without-a-question-mark/92833 "2007-04-24T21:01:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![xain](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/x/82dd89/32.png) [@xain](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/xain)\
**Post date:** [April 24, 2007, 9:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-link-without-a-question-mark/92833/1 "2007-04-24T21:01:32Z")

</div>

Rails makes links stay in a nice style for most of time.  
But what if a link have to pass several arguments.  
For instance, for a book site, would likely to have a link like this  
one:  
[http://www.a-book-site.com/books?category=5?language=2?author=23](http://www.a-book-site.com/books?category=5?language=2?author=23)  
this link will show book list that fits every argument.

since it’s an open page url, not a system management one, I don’t want  
to POST this arguments, because then this page may be invisible for most  
of search engines.

of cause, I can change it to  
[http://www.a-book-site.com/books/category/5/lauguage/2/author/23](http://www.a-book-site.com/books/category/5/lauguage/2/author/23)  
but its seems like a url that sunk kind of too deep . And more  
importantly, if I want most of arguments to be optional (some time I’ll  
like to check all book that has category=5 and author=23 attributes), as  
the number of the arguments grow, change the order of this arguments  
will lead to a huge work to fix the route.rb file.

I have seen a solution like this one:  
[http://www.a-book-site.com/books/category--5---lauguage--2---author--23/](http://www.a-book-site.com/books/category--5---lauguage--2---author--23/)  
but I haven’t had chance to take it into practice yet. and before that,  
I want to know what idea you’d like to share with me?