On 22 February 2010 03:21, Aaron W. [email protected] wrote:
What I want to accomplish is the ability to use a dash in my URL’s. I
have done some poking around but have not come up with much. The only
place I really need the dashes right now are in the action area. So
my URL would look like:
http://www.mydomain.com/content/site-map
If I may correct you; I’d guess that you don’t need hyphens in your
URL, you want them, and needs/wants are very different things.
There’s probably no reason why you can’t use an underscore instead to
keep nicely with a Rails convention:
http://www.mydomain.com/content/site_map
is just as readable, and possible, more SEO friendly (contentious
issue: hypen vs. underscore…)
Hypens are seen by Ruby as the “subtract operator”, and you can’t put
an operator in a function name definition (which is what a controller
action is). So you couldn’t do things like:
{:url => {:controller => :content, :action => :site-map } }
without Ruby throwing the dummy out of the pram, and even:
{:url => {:controller => :content, :action => “site-map” } }
would annoy Rails, but you should be able to do:
{:url => {:controller => :content, :action => :site_map, :page =>
“cool-stuff” } }
or
{:url => {:controller => :content, :action => :site_map, :page =>
“cool-stuff”.intern } }
To use them in the action parameter with success, you would have to
make sure you’ve re-written routes to map your hyphens to a different
character, which you use in the names of the controller action
methods… but why would you go to all that work, risking one
mistake breaking everything, when sticking to the convention makes
your life so easy?
HTH 
Michael