How to build hyphen separated string in PHP

Question

I want to make a hyphen separated string to use in the URL on the base of the user submitted title of the post. Suppose If user enter the title of the post as below

$title = "USA is going to deport indians -- Breaking News / News India";

I want to convert it as below

$url = "usa-is-going-to-deport-indians-breaking-news-news-india";

There could be some more characters that I also want to be converted. For Example '&' to 'and' and '#', '%', to hyphen(-). One of the way is to use the php replace function. But using this method, I have to call replace function so many times. It is time consuming. One more problem is there could be more than one hyphens (-) in the title string, I want to convert more than one hyphens (-) to one hyphen(-).

Is there any robust and efficient way to solve this problem?

They usually called "slug"s, search for this and it will yield relevant results. — complex857, Apr 04 '13 at 06:31
See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5305879/automatic-clean-and-seo-friendly-url-slugs?lq=1 — Barmar, Apr 04 '13 at 06:34

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 04 '13 at 06:33

8

You can use preg_replace function to do this :

Input :

$string = "USA is going to deport indians -- Breaking News / News India";

$string = preg_replace("/[^\w]+/", "-", $string);
echo strtolower($string);

Output :

usa-is-going-to-deport-indians-breaking-news-news-india

answered Apr 04 '13 at 06:33

Dead Man

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Thanks. But will it convert '&' to 'and' and '#', '%' to '-'. Please read my question fully. – Munib Apr 04 '13 at 09:31

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 06 '16 at 12:23

1

I would suggest using the sanitize_title() function check the documentation

edited Sep 06 '16 at 12:23

Divyang Desai

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answered Sep 06 '16 at 11:56

Lars

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How to build hyphen separated string in PHP

2 Answers2