using urlencode means that you don’t strip out or change any of the characters - you just encode the ones that are not allowed in a url so they are replaced by character combinations that are allowed and which can convert back to the original values when the url is decoded.
Sorry, I guess I didn’t explain clearly. In this case, I don’t want to display panthera-felis-sibirica; I want to strip out the parentheses AND THEIR CONTENTS, so it displays panthera-sibirica. Thanks.