Create slug-string from a title

Question

I try to get rid of some characters in a string. The string will be submited by a form (method: POST). I need to get a lower case string. The Characters ä, ö, ü and ß should become ae, oe, ue and ss. All other special characters and whitespaces should be removed.

The string

Lorem_ipsum_Ö-ß &änyOther char

should become

lorem-ipsum-oe-ss-aenyother-char

This is my code:

$slug = strtolower($_POST['title']); $slug = trim($slug, '-'); $slug = preg_replace('/ä/g', 'ae', $slug); $slug = preg_replace('/ö/g', 'oe', $slug); $slug = preg_replace('/ü/g', 'üe', $slug); $slug = preg_replace('/ß/g', 'ss', $slug); $slug = preg_replace('/[^\w ]/g', '', $slug); $slug = preg_replace('/ +/g', '-', $slug);

First of all, my attempt doesn't work as I want to.

And second: How can I make this code smaller? I guess it is possible to get this in just one regular expression...

no /g modifier for preg_match, remove it, will work fine. — Ohgodwhy
– Ohgodwhy, Commented Sep 8, 2014 at 20:02

hwnd · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-08 20:40:50Z

You could always create a function to do this. You can tweak this to your needs, here is an example.

function _replace($t) { $map = array( 'Ä' => 'ae', 'ä' => 'ae', 'ß' => 'ss', 'Ö' => 'oe', 'ö' => 'oe', 'Ü' => 'ue', 'ü' => 'ue' ); $slug = strtr(strtolower(trim($t)), $map); return preg_replace('~[\W_]+~', '-', $slug); }

Demo

Just one note to this: In my opinion you should use regex when you have to use regex. Otherwise it makes your code senselessly complicated. I honestly don't think that this is a use-case for a regex.

Ohgodwhy · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-08 20:21:37Z

There is no /g modifier for preg_match. You can use preg_match_all or you can just remove it.

Here's your eval.in

Conversely, if you're just looking to make cleaner URL's out of this and you're trying ot minimize the code into a 1-liner, we could use iconv with TRANSLIT to translate the charset to the closest charset of our choosing, such as UTF-8, then you could wrap it all up into a 1 liner.

$slug = strtolower(urlencode(preg_replace('/[\s\-]/', '', iconv('utf-8', 'ascii//TRANSLIT',$str))));

Here's the eval.in for this example

Is it possible to optimize the code? Or do I have to take eight single lines?

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