Best way to generate slugs (human-readable IDs) in Rails

Question

You know, like myblog.com/posts/donald-e-knuth.

Should I do this with the built in parameterize method?

What about a plugin? I could imagine a plugin being nice for handling duplicate slugs, etc. Here are some popular Github plugins -- does anyone have any experience with them?

1. http://github.com/rsl/stringex/tree/master
2. http://github.com/norman/friendly%5Fid/tree/master

Basically it seems like slugs are a totally solved problem, and I don't to reinvent the wheel.

Answer 1

We use to_slug http://github.com/ludo/to_slug/tree/master. Does everything we need it to do (escaping 'funky characters'). Hope this helps.

EDIT: Seems to be breaking my link, sorry about that.

Answer 2

Here is what I use:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_create :make_slug
  private

  def make_slug
    self.slug = self.name.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')
  end
end

Pretty self explanatory, although the only problem with this is if there is already the same one, it won't be name-01 or something like that.

Example:

".downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')".downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')

Outputs: -downcase-gsub-a-z1-9-chomp

Answer 3

The best way to generate slugs is to use the Unidecode gem. It has by far the largest transliteration database available. It has even transliterations for Chinese characters. Not to mention covering all European languages (including local dialects). It guarantees a bulletproof slug creation.

For example, consider those:

"Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn".to_slug
=> "internationalizaetion"

>> "中文測試".to_slug
=> "zhong-wen-ce-shi"

I use it in my version of the String.to_slug method in my ruby_extensions plugin. See ruby_extensions.rb for the to_slug method.