Htaccess redirect using mod_rewrite for friendly urls

Question

I am trying to trim my urls using htaccess when my index.php acts like a key with the following code:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ index.php?city=$1 [NC] 

To use this in my area, just add the following to work on mysite.com/members/index.php?city=$1

  RewriteRule ^members/([^/]+)$ index.php?city=$1 [NC] 

in the case of a city that has a few words, that is: the city of New York, what is the best way to approach this? defining it in .htaccess (not sure if possible) to change the city of New York → New York City or virtually any dash space. Or, do it in php with a function to replace '' → '-' for db requests that use $ _GET?

Answer 1

I would replace the spaces with strokes in PHP and then redirect to a new version of the URL to get easy to read addresses. (The space is encoded as% 20, which is not quite easy to read)

Thus, you can still enter the address domain.com/new york city , but will be redirected to domain.com/new-york-city instead of domain.com/new%20york%20city .

Replacing in .htaccess is possible with something like this:

 RewriteRule ^([^\s]*)\s(.*) $1-$2 [N] 

(Based on the response to Search and replace in apache htaccess RewriteRule )