Sending date( in d/m/Y format) in url in codeigniter

Sending date( in d/m/Y format) in url in codeigniter

I am currently working on a project built in codeigniter . I am trying to
send date in d/m/Y in url , eg
www.mydomain.com/guwahati-project-starting-12/12/2013. But if I want to
extract the controller name
$news_title = $this->uri->segment(1);
the above $news_title will only extract upto guwahati-project-starting-12.
Is there any way I can extract the full string except replacing / with - ?