How to generate seo friendly url's with php? - php

Question

I want to make http://mysite.com/id255/ to http://mysite.com/gora-beach-inn/.
My php looks like:
$result = mysql_query("
SELECT id, header
FROM Article
");
while($data = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
mysql_query("
UPDATE Article
SET seo = '".MakeSeo($data['header'])."'
WHERE datum = '".$data['datum']."'
");
}
//Convert: "åäö" to "aao", "space" to "-", "!?" to "nothing", and all to lower case.
function MakeSeo($string)
{
???
}
Please help me with the MakeSoe function.
I use moderewrite, so I just need help to generate the url, so I can save them in my database.

Answer 1

To just answer your requirement ..
here you go ..
function makeSeo($text, $limit=75)
{
// replace non letter or digits by -
$text = preg_replace('~[^\\pL\d]+~u', '-', $text);
// trim
$text = trim($text, '-');
// lowercase
$text = strtolower($text);
// remove unwanted characters
$text = preg_replace('~[^-\w]+~', '', $text);
if(strlen($text) > 70) {
$text = substr($text, 0, 70);
}
if (empty($text))
{
//return 'n-a';
return time();
}
return $text;
}
You can add more filters to clean the url and may be you add some more stuff to get that url a unique.
Note: I am not saying that adding url to the database is the best way. You could achieve the same sort of functionality using other techniques, for example, mod_rewrite.

Answer 2

You would need to use mod_rewrite to achieve this, otherwise the other approach is the 'internal' method done by php, where you would do something similar to:
http://mydomain.com/index.php/category/dogs
the above is just a GET post, and index handles the content loading via includes / mysql etc;

Answer 3

Non regular expression and more flexible solution can be done via 2 arrays. Define all charcters in from and to arrays. Omitted characters will be than replaced by -
This is example of javascript function
function ToSeoFriendly(title) {
title = title.toLowerCase();
var generated = "";
var from = "ãàáäâẽèéëêìíïîõòóöôùúüûñçýčšžřľňäôabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890";
var to = "aaaaaeeeeeiiiiooooouuuuncycszrlnaoabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890-";
for (var i=0;i<title.length;i++){
generated += to.substr(from.indexOf(title.substr(i,1)),1);
}
return generated;
}