Strip php variable, replace white spaces with dashes

Question

How can I convert a PHP variable from "My company & My Name" to "my-company-my-name"?

I need to make it all lowercase, remove all special characters and replace spaces with dashes.

Answer 1

This function will create an SEO friendly string

function seoUrl($string) {
    //Lower case everything
    $string = strtolower($string);
    //Make alphanumeric (removes all other characters)
    $string = preg_replace("/[^a-z0-9_\s-]/", "", $string);
    //Clean up multiple dashes or whitespaces
    $string = preg_replace("/[\s-]+/", " ", $string);
    //Convert whitespaces and underscore to dash
    $string = preg_replace("/[\s_]/", "-", $string);
    return $string;
}

should be fine :)

Answer 2

Yop, and if you want to handle any special characters you'll need to declare them in the pattern, otherwise they may get flushed out. You may do it that way:

strtolower(preg_replace('/-+/', '-', preg_replace('/[^\wáéíóú]/', '-', $string)));

Answer 3

Replacing specific characters: http://se.php.net/manual/en/function.str-replace.php

Example:

function replaceAll($text) { 
    $text = strtolower(htmlentities($text)); 
    $text = str_replace(get_html_translation_table(), "-", $text);
    $text = str_replace(" ", "-", $text);
    $text = preg_replace("/[-]+/i", "-", $text);
    return $text;
}