How do you remove invalid characters when creating a friendly url (ie how do you create a slug)?
I've come up with the 2 following extension methods (asp.net / C#):
public static string RemoveAccent(this string txt)
{
byte[] bytes = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("Cyrillic").GetBytes(txt);
return System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(bytes);
}
public static string Slugify(this string phrase)
{
string str = phrase.RemoveAccent().ToLower();
str = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(str, @"[^a-z0-9\s-]", ""); // Remove all non valid chars
str = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(str, @"\s+", " ").Trim(); // convert multiple spaces into one space
str = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(str, @"\s", "-"); // //Replace spaces by dashes
return str;
}
It depends on the language you are using and the technique you want to use. Take a look at this snippet of JavaScript from the Django source, it does exactly what you need. You can easily port it to the language of your choice I guess.
This is the Python snippet used in the Django slugify function, it's a lot shorter:
def slugify(value):
"""
Normalizes string, converts to lowercase, removes non-alpha characters,
and converts spaces to hyphens.
"""
import unicodedata
value = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', value).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
value = unicode(re.sub('[^\w\s-]', '', value).strip().lower())
return re.sub('[-\s]+', '-', value)
I think every language got a port of this, since it's a common problem. Just Google for slugify + your language.