You don't want to track and update a counter on every page hit, it'll have performance problems, won't work on cached pages, and the data will be prone to race conditions

I've done it in the past using Google Analytics

@Darth_Vader github.com/cftp/popular

@gmazzap could you please check, I think apostrophe is 26, not 27? gist.github.com/Giuseppe-Mazzapica/…

@gmazzap also you are breaking queries, ?foo=bar turns into ?bar

@TomJNowell wow.. dude you've done a lot. Maybe one day Ill get there, too.

@Rarst apostrophe is 27 3v4l.org/ImI4s I'll look at queries

@Rarst you right, when I cleaned up it to share... I cleaned too much. Fixed, should work now. See 3v4l.org/ldfgo

@gmazzap I wrote a different take today, with just some parts, not bothering recoding whole damn URL github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/pull/4653/files

apparently this is way easier in current PHP versions, which are up to date on 3986 thing

@Rarst that filter_var on top may produce some unwanted result... E.g. any URL that contains unencoded & in the path or in the query string will be just returned as is, which I think is not ok for your purpose...

I don't care at the moment, the PR is primarily to fix file names with UTF-8 chars

can always improve later. it's no worse than what's already in place for all other cases

@Darth_Vader pull requests welcome ^_^