Rewrite or filter title characters??

Is there a rewrite or some way to filter special characters from thread titles? If there is already a vBulletin control for this I apologize, but I've yet to locate it.

Basically what I'd like to do is delete any non a-z characters that get typed into thread titles. vBSEO already rewrites this in the URL but not the actual title. Example; if someone titles their thread "widget!?" I'd like to rewrite this as "widget". This is mostly for asthetics, since it drives me crazy to see all these characters appear in my navbar message.

Case in point, I purposely typed "??" after the title for this thread. The welcome message above says "This is a discussion on Rewrite or filter title characters?? within the General Discussion forums". To me seeing those two "??" mid sentence looks terrible.

Also while I don't know that much about SEO, I would think that both words (widget!? and widget) could be indexed differently. Regardless, I'd just rather not see non-alpha characters appear mid-sentence in a description.

Hi Ken,

I'm fairly certain that the Search Engines view a word the same, whether it is alone, or has punctuation before or after it.

Thanks, thats reassurring but I would still like to find out how to do this. Even if for nothing more than to figure it out. I started looking into writting a condition or something similar but yet to find the answer.

You can manually apply title modifications in includes/class_dm_threadpost.php file.
FIND:

PHP Code:

        $title = preg_replace('/&#(0*32|x0*20);/', ' ', $title); 


and add below your characters filtering code, like:

PHP Code:

        $title = preg_replace('/[\?\!]/', ' ', $title); 


(that will remove ? and ! characters)

Perfect! I took this a step further by adding all the characters I don't want to see or to be replaced by in all post titles. Here it is.

Found:

Code:

// replace html-encoded spaces with actual spaces
$title = preg_replace('/&#(0*32|x0*20);/', ' ', $title);

Added below it:

Code:

// replace special characters with actual spaces
$title = preg_replace('/[\?\!\#\$\%\^\*\~\|\:\;\...]/', ' ', $title);
// replace special characters with...
$title = preg_replace('/[\@]/', ' at ', $title);
$title = preg_replace('/[\+]/', ' plus ', $title);
$title = preg_replace('/[\=]/', ' equals ', $title);
$title = preg_replace('/[\&]/', ' and ', $title);

Thanks Oleg

Instead of last 4 lines you can use:

PHP Code:

$title = str_replace(
array('@', '+', '=', '^'),
array(' at ', ' plus ', ' equals ', ' and '),
$title); 


Yeah, actually thought of writing it that way afterward.

Thanks again!