How to remove all special characters from URL? - php

Question

I have my class
public function convert( $title )
{
$nameout = strtolower( $title );
$nameout = str_replace(' ', '-', $nameout );
$nameout = str_replace('.', '', $nameout);
$nameout = str_replace('æ', 'ae', $nameout);
$nameout = str_replace('ø', 'oe', $nameout);
$nameout = str_replace('å', 'aa', $nameout);
$nameout = str_replace('(', '', $nameout);
$nameout = str_replace(')', '', $nameout);
$nameout = preg_replace("[^a-z0-9-]", "", $nameout);
return $nameout;
}
BUt I can't get it to work when I use special characters like ö and ü and other, can sombody help me here? I use PHP 5.3.

Answer 1

The first answer in this SO thread contains the code you need to do this.

Answer 2

And what about:
<?php
$query_string = 'foo=' . urlencode($foo) . '&bar=' . urlencode($bar);
echo '<a href="mycgi?' . htmlentities($query_string) . '">';
?>
From: http://php.net/manual/en/function.urlencode.php

Answer 3

I wrote this function a while ago for a project I was working on and couldn't get RegEx to work. Its not the best way, but it works.
function safeURL($input){
$input = strtolower($input);
for($i = 0; $i < strlen($input); $i++){
$working = ord(substr($input,$i,1));
if(($working>=97)&&($working<=122)){
//a-z
$out = $out . chr($working);
} elseif(($working>=48)&&($working<=57)){
//0-9
$out = $out . chr($working);
} elseif($working==46){
//.
$out = $out . chr($working);
} elseif($working==45){
//-
$out = $out . chr($working);
}
}
return $out;
}

Answer 4

Here's a function to help with what you're doing, it's written in
Czech: http://php.vrana.cz/vytvoreni-pratelskeho-url.php
(and translated to English)
Here's another take on it (from the Symfony documentation):
<?php
function slugify($text)
{
// replace non letter or digits by -
$text = preg_replace('~[^\\pL\d]+~u', '-', $text);
// trim
$text = trim($text, '-');
// transliterate
if (function_exists('iconv'))
{
$text = iconv('utf-8', 'us-ascii//TRANSLIT', $text);
}
// lowercase
$text = strtolower($text);
// remove unwanted characters
$text = preg_replace('~[^-\w]+~', '', $text);
if (empty($text))
{
return 'n-a';
}
return $text;
}