Handle url's character casing in Laravel? - php

Question

How to I redirect following urls to lower case url?
http://domain.com/City/really-long-slug-from-db/photos
http://domain.com/city/Really-Long-Slug-From-Db/photos
http://domain.com/City/really-long-slug-from-db/Photos
to
http://domain.com/city/really-long-slug-from-db/photos
This is my route:
Route::any('/{city}/{slug}/{page?}',
array(
'as' => 'slug-page',
function($city, $slug, $page="info"){
return View::make('default.template.'.$page)
->with('city', $city)
->with('page',$page)
->with('slug', $slug);
}
))
->where(
array(
'city' => '[a-z ]+',
'page' => '[a-z-]+',
'slug' => '(about|photos|videos)'
));
Currently I used regex [a-z-]+ to match only smaller case strings and that throws NotFoundHttpException for obvious reasons.
How do I accept all these parameters in case insensitive strings and 301 redirect(to avoid duplicate urls) to smaller case urls in Laravel 5.1?

Answer 1

You could easily do that with a route middleware. The middleware should check if there are any uppercase characters in the path and redirect to lowercased version.
First, define the middleware class:
class RedirectToLowercase
{
public function handle($request, Closure $next) {
$path = $request->path();
$pathLowercase = strtolower($path); // convert to lowercase
if ($path !== $pathLowercase) {
// redirect if lowercased path differs from original path
return redirect($pathLowercase);
}
return $next($request);
}
}
Then register the new middleware in your Kernel.php:
protected $routeMiddleware = array(
// ... some other middleware classes ...
'lowercase' => 'App\Http\Middleware\RedirectToLowercase'
);
Finally, apply the middleware to your route:
Route::any('/{city}/{slug}/{page?}', array(
'as' => 'slug-page',
'middleware' => 'lowercase',
function() {
// your code
})
);