How to improve my Seo url generator

Question

Hi

i have this function which generates a seo friendly url from a string :

 function seo_titleinurl_generate($title)
         {


            $title=substr($title,0,160);

            $title = ereg_replace(" ", "-", $title); // replace spaces by "-"

            $title = ereg_replace("á", "a", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("í", "i", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("ó", "o", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("ú", "u", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("ñ", "n", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("Ñ", "n", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = strtolower(trim($title)); // lowercase
            $title = preg_replace("/([^a-zA-Z0-9_-])/",'',$title); // only keep  standard latin letters and numbers, hyphens and dashes

           if($title=="" or $title=="-"){
           $mr=rand(1,99999);
           $mt=time();
           $title=$mr.$mt;
         }

             return $title;
     }

But in some cases when the string has multiple spaces like : the most (3 spaces here) nice pranks! it's generates : the-most---nice-pranks

i want it to ignore many spaces and make them only one dash.

Thanks

Answer 1

Simply add at the beginning:

$title = ereg_replace(/\s+/, " ", $title); 

Answer 2

I think this may be a little faster than the previous answer because it won't mess around with single spaces (I could be wrong):

$title = preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', $title);

Answer 3

This uses preg_replace since ereg_replace is deprecated and going away in PHP 6. It also uses arrays to reduce the number of function calls and str_replace for one-to-one replacements (it's faster):

function seo_titleinurl_generate($title)
{
        $title = substr(strtolower(trim($title)),0,160);

        $title = preg_replace('/\s+/', '-', $title); // replace spaces by "-"
        $title = str_replace(array("á","í","ó","ú","ñ","Ñ"), array("a","i","o","u","n","n"), $title);// replace special chars
        $title = preg_replace('/\W-/', '', $title); // only keep  standard latin letters and numbers, hyphens and dashes

        if($title=="" or $title=="-"){
            $mr=rand(1,99999);
            $mt=time();
            $title=$mr.$mt;
        }
        return $title;
 } 

Answer 4

I suggest the following:

/**
* Produce a title with lowercase alphanumeric characters, underscores, 
* and dashes.  There should be no instances of multiple concurrent dashes, 
* and no spaces.
*
* @param string $title the title being sanitized
*
* @return string the sanitized title, or a concatenation of a random 
*                number and the current time
*/
function seoTitleInUrlGenerate($title)
{
    $title = substr( 
                 preg_replace(
                     array("/([^a-zA-Z0-9_-])/", "/([--]{2,})+/"),
                     array('', '-'),
                     strtolower( strtr( trim($title), 'áéíóúñÑ ', 'aeiounN-' ) )
                 ), 0, 160
             );

    if ($title == "" or $title == "-")
    {
        return rand(1, 99999) . time();
    }
    else
    {
        return $title;
    }
 }

When tested with the input you provided...

echo seoTitleInUrlGenerate('the most    nice pranks!'); // "the-most-nice-pranks"

Rather than returning the random number and time, I would suggest returning FALSE if you were not able to produce a valid title to use in the URL. This way perhaps you can make a record of the invalid title somewhere and fix it later. With the function as it is now, you just get a numerical return value and don't really know if it's the result of an invalid title or if it's a valid title that happened to be full of numbers.

Answer 5

Take a look at the following code:

function Slug($string)
{
    return strtolower(trim(preg_replace(array('~[^0-9a-z]~i', '~-+~'), '-', preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);~i', '$1', htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'))), '-'));
}