Best way to convert title into url compatible mode in PHP? - php

Question

http://domain.name/1-As Low As 10% Downpayment, Free Golf Membership!!!
The above url will report 400 bad request,
how to convert such title to user friendly good request?

Answer 1

You may want to use a "slug" instead. Rather than using the verbatim title as the URL, you strtolower() and replace all non-alphanumeric characters with hyphens, then remove duplicate hyphens. If you feel like extra credit, you can strip out stopwords, too.
So "1-As Low As 10% Downpayment, Free Golf Membership!!!" becomes:
as-low-as-10-downpayment-free-gold-membership
Something like this:
function sluggify($url)
{
# Prep string with some basic normalization
$url = strtolower($url);
$url = strip_tags($url);
$url = stripslashes($url);
$url = html_entity_decode($url);
# Remove quotes (can't, etc.)
$url = str_replace('\'', '', $url);
# Replace non-alpha numeric with hyphens
$match = '/[^a-z0-9]+/';
$replace = '-';
$url = preg_replace($match, $replace, $url);
$url = trim($url, '-');
return $url;
}
You could probably shorten it with longer regexps but it's pretty straightforward as-is. The bonus is that you can use the same function to validate the query parameter before you run a query on the database to match the title, so someone can't stick silly things into your database.

Answer 2

See the first answer here URL Friendly Username in PHP?:
function Slug($string)
{
return strtolower(trim(preg_replace('~[^0-9a-z]+~i', '-', html_entity_decode(preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(?:acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);~i', '$1', htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')), '-'));
}
$user = 'Alix Axel';
echo Slug($user); // alix-axel
$user = 'Álix Ãxel';
echo Slug($user); // alix-axel
$user = 'Álix----_Ãxel!?!?';
echo Slug($user); // alix-axel

Answer 3

You can use urlencode or rawurlencode... for example Wikipedia do that. See this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichigo_100%25
that's the php encoding for % = %25

Answer 4

I just create a gist with a useful slug function:
https://gist.github.com/ninjagab/11244087
You can use it to convert title to seo friendly url.
<?php
class SanitizeUrl {
public static function slug($string, $space="-") {
$string = utf8_encode($string);
if (function_exists('iconv')) {
$string = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);
}
$string = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9 \-]/", "", $string);
$string = trim(preg_replace("/\\s+/", " ", $string));
$string = strtolower($string);
$string = str_replace(" ", $space, $string);
return $string;
}
}
$title = 'Thi is a test string with some "strange" chars ò à ù...';
echo SanitizeUrl::slug($title);
//this will output:
//thi-is-a-test-string-with-some-strange-chars-o-a-u

Answer 5

You could use the rawurlencode() function

Answer 6

To simplify just full the list of the variable $change_to and $to_change
<?php
// Just full the array list to make replacement complete
// In this space will change to _, à to just a
$to_change = [
' ', 'à', 'à', 'â','é', 'è', 'ê', 'ç', 'ù', 'ô', 'ö' // and so on
];
$change_to = [
'_', 'a', 'a', 'a', 'e', 'e', 'e','c', 'u', 'o', 'o' // and so on
];
$texts = 'This is my slug in êlàb élaboré par';
$page_id = str_replace($to_change, $change_to, $texts);