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Here's how we do it. Note that there are probably more edge conditions than you realize at first glance.
This is the second version, unrolled for 5x more performance (and yes, I benchmarked it). I figured I'd optimize it because this function can be called hundreds of times per page.
/// <summary>
/// Produces optional, URL-friendly version of a title, "like-this-one".
/// hand-tuned for speed, reflects performance refactoring contributed
/// by John Gietzen (user otac0n)
/// </summary>
public static string URLFriendly(string title)
{
if (title == null) return "";
const int maxlen = 80;
int len = title.Length;
bool prevdash = false;
var sb = new StringBuilder(len);
char c;
for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
{
c = title[i];
if ((c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') || (c >= '0' && c <= '9'))
{
sb.Append(c);
prevdash = false;
}
else if (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z')
{
// tricky way to convert to lowercase
sb.Append((char)(c | 32));
prevdash = false;
}
else if (c == ' ' || c == ',' || c == '.' || c == '/' ||
c == '\\' || c == '-' || c == '_' || c == '=')
{
if (!prevdash && sb.Length > 0)
{
sb.Append('-');
prevdash = true;
}
}
else if ((int)c >= 128)
{
int prevlen = sb.Length;
sb.Append(RemapInternationalCharToAscii(c));
if (prevlen != sb.Length) prevdash = false;
}
if (i == maxlen) break;
}
if (prevdash)
return sb.ToString().Substring(0, sb.Length - 1);
else
return sb.ToString();
}
To see the previous version of the code this replaced (but is functionally equivalent to, and 5x faster), view revision history of this post (click the date link).
Also, the RemapInternationalCharToAscii method source code can be found here.
Here is my version of Jeff's code. I've made the following changes:
The case conversion is now also optional.
public static class Slug
{
public static string Create(bool toLower, params string[] values)
{
return Create(toLower, String.Join("-", values));
}
/// <summary>
/// Creates a slug.
/// References:
/// http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/tr15-34.html
/// https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7435/non-us-ascii-characters-dropped-from-full-profile-url/7696#7696
/// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25259/how-do-you-include-a-webpage-title-as-part-of-a-webpage-url/25486#25486
/// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3769457/how-can-i-remove-accents-on-a-string
/// </summary>
/// <param name="toLower"></param>
/// <param name="normalised"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static string Create(bool toLower, string value)
{
if (value == null)
return "";
var normalised = value.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormKD);
const int maxlen = 80;
int len = normalised.Length;
bool prevDash = false;
var sb = new StringBuilder(len);
char c;
for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
{
c = normalised[i];
if ((c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') || (c >= '0' && c <= '9'))
{
if (prevDash)
{
sb.Append('-');
prevDash = false;
}
sb.Append(c);
}
else if (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z')
{
if (prevDash)
{
sb.Append('-');
prevDash = false;
}
// Tricky way to convert to lowercase
if (toLower)
sb.Append((char)(c | 32));
else
sb.Append(c);
}
else if (c == ' ' || c == ',' || c == '.' || c == '/' || c == '\\' || c == '-' || c == '_' || c == '=')
{
if (!prevDash && sb.Length > 0)
{
prevDash = true;
}
}
else
{
string swap = ConvertEdgeCases(c, toLower);
if (swap != null)
{
if (prevDash)
{
sb.Append('-');
prevDash = false;
}
sb.Append(swap);
}
}
if (sb.Length == maxlen)
break;
}
return sb.ToString();
}
static string ConvertEdgeCases(char c, bool toLower)
{
string swap = null;
switch (c)
{
case 'ı':
swap = "i";
break;
case 'ł':
swap = "l";
break;
case 'Ł':
swap = toLower ? "l" : "L";
break;
case 'đ':
swap = "d";
break;
case 'ß':
swap = "ss";
break;
case 'ø':
swap = "o";
break;
case 'Þ':
swap = "th";
break;
}
return swap;
}
}
For more details, the unit tests, and an explanation of why Facebook's URL scheme is a little smarter than Stack Overflows, I've got an expanded version of this on my blog.
You will want to setup a custom route to point the URL to the controller that will handle it. Since you are using Ruby on Rails, here is an introduction in using their routing engine.
In Ruby, you will need a regular expression like you already know and here is the regular expression to use:
def permalink_for(str)
str.gsub(/[^\w\/]|[!\(\)\.]+/, ' ').strip.downcase.gsub(/\ +/, '-')
end
You can also use this JavaScript function for in-form generation of the slug's (this one is based on/copied from Django):
function makeSlug(urlString, filter) {
// Changes, e.g., "Petty theft" to "petty_theft".
// Remove all these words from the string before URLifying
if(filter) {
removelist = ["a", "an", "as", "at", "before", "but", "by", "for", "from",
"is", "in", "into", "like", "of", "off", "on", "onto", "per",
"since", "than", "the", "this", "that", "to", "up", "via", "het", "de", "een", "en",
"with"];
}
else {
removelist = [];
}
s = urlString;
r = new RegExp('\\b(' + removelist.join('|') + ')\\b', 'gi');
s = s.replace(r, '');
s = s.replace(/[^-\w\s]/g, ''); // Remove unneeded characters
s = s.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, ''); // Trim leading/trailing spaces
s = s.replace(/[-\s]+/g, '-'); // Convert spaces to hyphens
s = s.toLowerCase(); // Convert to lowercase
return s; // Trim to first num_chars characters
}
For good measure, here's the PHP function in WordPress that does it... I'd think that WordPress is one of the more popular platforms that uses fancy links.
function sanitize_title_with_dashes($title) {
$title = strip_tags($title);
// Preserve escaped octets.
$title = preg_replace('|%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])|', '---$1---', $title);
// Remove percent signs that are not part of an octet.
$title = str_replace('%', '', $title);
// Restore octets.
$title = preg_replace('|---([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])---|', '%$1', $title);
$title = remove_accents($title);
if (seems_utf8($title)) {
if (function_exists('mb_strtolower')) {
$title = mb_strtolower($title, 'UTF-8');
}
$title = utf8_uri_encode($title, 200);
}
$title = strtolower($title);
$title = preg_replace('/&.+?;/', '', $title); // kill entities
$title = preg_replace('/[^%a-z0-9 _-]/', '', $title);
$title = preg_replace('/\s+/', '-', $title);
$title = preg_replace('|-+|', '-', $title);
$title = trim($title, '-');
return $title;
}
This function as well as some of the supporting functions can be found in wp-includes/formatting.php.
If you are using Rails edge, you can rely on Inflector.parametrize - here's the example from the documentation:
class Person
def to_param
"#{id}-#{name.parameterize}"
end
end
@person = Person.find(1)
# => #<Person id: 1, name: "Donald E. Knuth">
<%= link_to(@person.name, person_path(@person)) %>
# => <a href="/person/1-donald-e-knuth">Donald E. Knuth</a>
Also if you need to handle more exotic characters such as accents (éphémère) in previous version of Rails, you can use a mixture of PermalinkFu and DiacriticsFu:
DiacriticsFu::escape("éphémère")
=> "ephemere"
DiacriticsFu::escape("räksmörgås")
=> "raksmorgas"
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