Categories URL changin “_” to “-”

Question

I was changing all my categories URLS to match my old website when i notices magento kept changing them when I click saved.

For example i would write "nike_air_force_one" and once i clicked saved magento would change it to "nike-air-force-one"

SO my questions is how can I stop it form changing my URLS as I need them to match my old site for Google ratings?

Answer 1

The url key passes through this method before saving it: Mage_Catalog_Model_Category::formatUrlKey that looks like this:

public function formatUrlKey($str)
{
    $str = Mage::helper('catalog/product_url')->format($str);
    $urlKey = preg_replace('#[^0-9a-z]+#i', '-', $str);
    $urlKey = strtolower($urlKey);
    $urlKey = trim($urlKey, '-');
    return $urlKey;
}

The first line just translates some characters. For example ê becomes e.
The second line replaces everything that is not numerical or a letter with -.
So you need to add underscore in that regular expression.

$urlKey = preg_replace('#[^0-9a-z_]+#i', '-', $str);

But please don't modify the core core. Just rewrite the category model.