Permalink issue - need some help

Hi everyone,
I'm an old school asp programmer, so in terms of PHP I'm totally lost. I'm running custom blog software that I've just recently made some changes to, and now it seems I've hit the wall.

I have the following snippet of code that I need to point at certain pages, but I'm totally lost.

<a href="/<?php echo permalink($rstDBEdit);?>" title="<?php echo $rstDBEdit["podcast_title"];?>"><?php echo $rstDBEdit["podcast_title"];?></a>

...and here's the function that calls the permalink stuff.

function permalink($a)
{
// need to get category
$r=query_wrapper("SELECT * FROM blog_category WHERE cat_ID = ?",$a["article_category"]);
$c=mysql_fetch_assoc($r);
if(!$c)$c=array("cat_category"=>"-");

$c=preg_replace('@[^\w\s]@si','-',$c["cat_category"]);
$c=preg_replace('@\s+@si','-',$c);

$p=preg_replace('@[^\w\s]@si','',$a['article_title']);
$p=preg_replace('@\s+@si','-',$p);
return strtolower("$c/$a[article_ID]/$p.php");
}

The problem is, I've just added podcasts to my site, and now I would like to use the same function to call entries to the podcast table within the database.

I'm completely lost, how do I do this?

Could I do a permalink ($b) or something?????


function permalink($b)
{
// need to get category
$r=query_wrapper("SELECT * FROM blog_category WHERE cat_ID = ?",$a["podcast_category"]);
$c=mysql_fetch_assoc($r);
if(!$c)$c=array("cat_category"=>"-");

$c=preg_replace('@[^\w\s]@si','-',$c["cat_category"]);
$c=preg_replace('@\s+@si','-',$c);

$p=preg_replace('@[^\w\s]@si','',$a['podcast_title']);
$p=preg_replace('@\s+@si','-',$p);
return strtolower("$c/$a[podcast_ID]/$p.php");
}

Anyone?

There' a lot of info that I'm not really understanding, but from what you've written perhaps you could alter the permalink function like so:



Also what blog software are you using? I would guess that they have some built in way to do this besides hacking this function ... so you might go to the docs and see if you can figure out a kosher way to do this.

Thank you so much for responding, I really appreciate it. Unfortunately however that didn't work, and I'm at a bit of a loss on how to correct it.

It certainly *looks* close.

How can I clarify further to make it easier for you?

The software is custom made (my old programmer helped with it) but unfortunately he's not available.


Your script appears to include a case statement, where in this URL would I define the case that needs to be called?

Podcast link.



Blog link.

For blog links you shouldn't have to change anything, for your podcasts you'd just add the second parameter:

Cool.

Okay, getting closer.

I'm getting the following URL when I mouse over the podcast link...

http://localhost/14/9/test.php (working locally)

It appears its pulling cat_id_field (14) instead of the actual category name, which is 'cat_category' within the DB.

It *should* read something like ....

http://localhost/conversions/9/test.php

The blog link errors out?

I should note that both podcasts and blogs use the same category table in the DB.

Its called 'blog_category'

Not sure if this helps any, but heres a screenshot of that table.

recipeschickenbreast.com/images/db.gif