How to avoid uppercase/spaces in tag related urls?

I have installed and configured the latest 1.8 beta version, and it seems to work smoothly when using metakeys: keys are correctly converted to tags.

But the url assigned to each tag contain spaces and upercases if tags also contain them!
In many cases I need to use 2 or 3 space-separated words to specify a key, and sometime i also need to set as uppercase the first character of one or more of that words.

This is a sample of the key a need to set:
key: Roma rione VII Regola

This is a sample of what I get:
url: www.mmcedizioni.it/it/component/vm2tags/...egola.html?Itemid=43

I wold like to get a url like this, instead:
url: www.mmcedizioni.it/it/component/vm2tags/...egola.html?Itemid=43

Please, keep in mind that sometime in my language (italian) keys could contain some special charcaters like 'é', 'è', 'à' etc., and they should also be converted to the correspondent standard char.

Is there a way to get this result?

And more, is there also a way to reduce url lenght, having something like this:
url: www.mmcedizioni.it/it/tags/roma-rione-vii-regola.html?Itemid=43

Thank you in advance for your reply
Regards

Hello

I understand that url would look nicer if spaces would have - instead of %20 (spaces) but
URL needs to transmit the tag exactly as is stored in the metakey field.

For example a tag such as 'nice rendez-vous' would become
nice-rendez-vous in the URL
then on the product list page we wan't to find what products have that tag but we now have to replace - with spaces before the query and we get 'nice rendez vous' wich is not correct as the rendez-vous - is replaced.

Same for Uppercases, if you don't want them in the url you should not have them in the metakey field.
If we alter a tag in the url , we can't find it in the database on the next page. The url is transmitting it as a parameter.

We still currently have an issue with accuented characters on some servers and only when sef is on.
Have you tried it ?


FOr the url length, you could try creating a menu item (to an invisible menu for instance) for the tag list.
Call it 'tags' and right down it's itemid.

In the component settings, add this Itemid for VM2tags menu Item id value.
Then, the SEF url should mention your menu item title.

Thank you for your ultra fast reply

The question I posed about spaces comes from SEO needing: it seems to be not a good practice inserting spaces in url.
I could suggest you a "middle-point" solution, if applicable: you could add an extra '-' when one or more '-' are already in tag, and strip it back before looking for tag in database; with this simple action, 'nice rendez-vous' will become nice-rendez--vous', and replacing back the single '-' with ' ', and the '--' with '-' will do the trick. May this be coded without any other issue?
For the uppercase, I'll look for a css solution, but you should consider it in a next release, if possible

Btw in beta4, there is a new parameter in the backend where you can replace the term 'productlist' in SEF urls.

I posted my 2nd reply when you were posting yours.

A space in a url is not a bad seo practice, but I could implement your double - workaround.
I'll add it to beta5 so you can test it.

Great!

I'll wait for the next beta and report here the test results.

Thank you again for your efforts
Regards