How to use Codeigniter routes with UTF-8 like Arabic characters 404

Question

I am trying to use Arabic/Persian/Farsi character in the URL as a slug in Codeigniter like so: I created MY_url_helper.php helper file to add the Arabic characters as accepted characters in the url_title Codeigniter function ``` /** * Create URL Title that allows Arabic characters * * Takes a "title" string as input and creates a * human-friendly URL string with a "separator" string * as the word separator. * * @access public * @param string the string * @param string the separator * @return string */ function url_title($str, $separator = '-', $lowercase = FALSE) { if ($separator == 'dash') { $separator = '-'; } else if ($separator == 'underscore') { $separator = '_'; } $q_separator = preg_quote($separator); $trans = array( '&.+?;' => '', '[^[U+0621]-[U+064a]a-z0-9 _-]' => '', '\s+' => $separator, '(' . $q_separator . ')+' => $separator ); $str = strip_tags($str); foreach ($trans as $key => $val) { $str = preg_replace("#" . $key . "#i", $val, $str); } if ($lowercase === TRUE) { $str =…

Accepted Answer

The solution is as simple as this:

in the routes.php config file do the following:

```
$mission = urlencode('مهمتنا');
$route['^(en|ar)/'.$mission] = "pages/index/".$mission;
```

no need to change the permitted_uri_chars in the config.php config file.

if the error was with the permitted_uri_chars the output would have been 400 "The URI you submitted has disallowed characters." not 404 as you can see here at system/core/URI.php, on line 231:

```
if (!preg_match("|^[".str_replace(array('\-', '\-'), '-', preg_quote($this->config->item('permitted_uri_chars'), '-'))."]+$|i", $str))
{
    show_error('The URI you submitted has disallowed characters.', 400);
}
```

How to use Codeigniter routes with UTF-8 like Arabic characters 404

Solution

Problem