convert arabic string to utf8 encoded url - php

Question

lets assume that i have a string as the following:
إصلاح إصلاح
and i want to convert it to seo friendly url removing slashes and special characters with the following function calls
$title = trim(strtolower($str));
$title = preg_replace('#[^a-z0-9\s-]#',null, $title);
$title = preg_replace('#[\s-]+#','-', $title);
in English its working fine and its giving correct results but in arabic its giving the following result :
15731589160415751581-15731589160415751581
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I'd suggest urlencode() with unique post id, like
/blog/12345-<?= urlencode('إصلاح إصلاح') ?>

Answer 2

This is an unsolved problem yet. What you basically had to do is to transliterate any given character (irrelevant if arabic or chinese or japanese or whatever) to latin transcription and then perform the URI generation methods on it.
There is some basic(!) support in iconv for this, have a look at http://ch.php.net/manual/de/function.iconv.php, you have to use iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', $text) but as I said, support is limited.
If I were you I would just remove spaces and such and then call urlencode() on it:
$url = urlencode(mb_ereg_replace('\s+', '-', $url));
I'm using mb_ereg_replace() because it is unicode aware and such replaces unicode whitespaces as well.

Answer 3

The unicode property for arabic letter is : \p{arabic}, change the second preg_replace by:
$title = preg_replace('#[^\p{arabic}\s-]#',null, $title);

Answer 4

Try This function. I always use it and it works perfectly!
function SafeUrl3($str) {
$friendlyURL = htmlentities($str, ENT_COMPAT, "UTF-8", false) ;
$friendlyURL = preg_replace ( "/[^أ-يa-zA-Z0-9_.-]/u", "-", $friendlyURL ) ;
$friendlyURL = html_entity_decode($friendlyURL,ENT_COMPAT, "UTF-8") ;
$friendlyURL = trim($friendlyURL, '-') ;
return $friendlyURL ;
}