Reverse Engineering the Giant Bomb URLs

Hey duders, 
I'm trying do a lookup on the API using only the data I can glean from the URL itself. Take, for example, Mario's page: 
http://www.giantbomb.com/mario/94-177/  
 From what I can tell, the word "mario" is ignored and is just there to make the URL human-readable. Instead, Giant Bomb seems to use the numbers (94-177) to resolve the resource and forward to its page. Now, all of the characters I've looked up start with "94-" so I assume "94" stands for character. If you look up /character/177 in the API, it returns Mario's details so 177 must be Mario's ID. 
Now, my question is, is there a more straightforward way of finding an object based on its URL? Or do I need to figure out the ID for each object type and store those in my application for making requests?
Thanks, 
 Drew

That's about it. The number before the hyphen indicates the page type, and the number after the hyphen is the ID of the page. Here's something I threw together in December. It doesn't give any information with regard to the API, but you can easily get that from the API documentation
 

 Giant Bomb