Java and SEO friendly URLs: ©reate ╨ a valid http URL from a string composed by special caracters

Question

I'm trying to extract SEO friendly URLs from strings that can contain special characters, letter with accents, Chinese like characters, etc.
SO is doing this and it's translating this post title in

java-and-seo-friendly-urls-reate--a-valid-http-url-from-a-string-composed-by-s

I'm trying to do this in Java.
I'm using this post solution with URLEncoder.encode to translate Chinese and other symbols into valid URL characters.

Have you ever implemented something like this? Is there a better way?

Answer 1

This might be an oversimplistic approach to the problem, but you could just use regular expressions to remove all non standard characters. So after converting your string to lowercase, you can replace all non lowercase alphabetic characters with an empty character and then replace all spaces with the '-' character.

private static String encodeForUrl(String input) {
  return input.toLowerCase().replaceAll("[^a-z\\s]", "").replaceAll("\\s", "-");
}