Help me with passing clean URL with special characters

Server Config
1

I’m having issues cleaning out special characters from my script
currently I’m using the toAscii function(below) and it is removing all special characters such as %,$,# and so on, and it does work

this is how a cleaned URL looks like

http://www.site.cxx/latest/this-is-test.html

but when I click on the actual link it doesn’t work just sends me back to the home page. Any ideas

thanks

here is the code that retrieves from DB

<?php	while($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($getAll)){	?> 
    
  <div class="news">
    <span class="antetitulo">text"</span>
    <br />
    <h2 class="title h2">
      <a href="http://www.site.cxx/<?=str_ireplace(" ","-",html_entity_decode($row['genre']));?>/<?php echo toAscii($row['name']); ?>.html"><?=html_entity_decode($row['name']);?></a> 
    </h2>
	 <img src="http://www.site.cxx/images/<?=$row['image'];?>" width="350"   height="103" />

    <div class="text">

   <?php echo substr(strip_tags($row['description']),0,130)  ?>.</span></div>
    <br class="c" />
  </div>

  <?php	$i++;	}?>

I’m also trying to “clean” characters using this function

<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF8');
function toAscii($str, $replace=array(), $delimiter='-') {
	if( !empty($replace) ) {
		$str = str_replace((array)$replace, ' ', $str);
	}

	$clean = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $str);
	$clean = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\\/_|+ -]/", '', $clean);
	$clean = strtolower(trim($clean, '-'));
	$clean = preg_replace("/[\\/_|+ -]+/", $delimiter, $clean);

	return $clean;
}
?>

this is my .htaccess

RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/([^/]*)\\.html$ /news.php?cat=$1&news=$2 [L]
2

Sinz,

It’s too late this evening to answer this so please refer to the tutorial linked in my signature as it will lead you through the development of the solution.

Regards,

DK