How to generate seo friendly url's with php?

Question

Hi, I want to make http://mysite.com/id255/ to http://mysite.com/gora-beach-inn/.

My php looks like:

$result = mysql_query("
    SELECT id, header
    FROM Article
");


while($data = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){  
    mysql_query("
     UPDATE Article
     SET seo = '".MakeSeo($data['header'])."'
     WHERE datum = '".$data['datum']."'
    ");
}

//Convert: "åäö" to "aao", "space" to "-", "!?" to "nothing", and all to lower case.
function MakeSeo($string)
{
    ???
}

Please help me with the MakeSoe function.

I use moderewrite, so I just need help to generate the url, so I can save them in my database.

Answer 1

You would need to use mod_rewrite to achieve this, otherwise the other approach is the 'internal' method done by php, where you would do something similar to:

http://mydomain.com/index.php/category/dogs

the above is just a GET post, and index handles the content loading via includes / mysql etc;

Answer 2

To just answer your requirement .. here you go ..

function makeSeo($text, $limit=75)
    {
      // replace non letter or digits by -
      $text = preg_replace('~[^\\pL\d]+~u', '-', $text);

      // trim
      $text = trim($text, '-');

      // lowercase
      $text = strtolower($text);

      // remove unwanted characters
      $text = preg_replace('~[^-\w]+~', '', $text);

      if(strlen($text) > 70) {
       $text = substr($text, 0, 70);
      } 

      if (empty($text))
      {
        //return 'n-a';
        return time();
      }

      return $text;
    }

You can add more filters to clean the url and may be you add some more stuff to get that url a unique.

Note: I am not saying that adding url to the database is the best way. You could achieve the same sort of functionality using other techniques, for example, mod_rewrite.