What is a good complete regular expression or some other process that would take the title:
How do you change a title to be part of the URL like Stack Overflow?
and turn it into
how-do-you-change-a-title-to-be-part-of-the-url-like-stack-overflow
that is used in the SEO-friendly URLs on Stack Overflow?
The development environment I am using is Ruby on Rails, but if there are some other platform-specific solutions (.NET, PHP, Django), I would love to see those too.
I am sure I (or another reader) will come across the same problem on a different platform down the line.
I am using custom routes, and I mainly want to know how to alter the string to all special characters are removed, it's all lowercase, and all whitespace is replaced.
Best Answer
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.
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.