Best way to convert title into url compatible mode in PHP?

Question

http://domain.name/1-As Low As 10% Downpayment, Free Golf Membership!!!

The above url will report 400 bad request,

how to convert such title to user friendly good request?

Answer 1

Check out rawurlencode http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.rawurlencode.php

Answer 2

See the first answer here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2103797/url-friendly-username-in-php

Answer 3

You can use urlencode or rawurlencode... for example Wikipedia do that. See this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichigo_100%25

that's the php encoding for % = %25

Answer 4

You may want to use a "slug" instead. Rather than using the verbatim title as the URL, you strtolower() and replace all non-alphanumeric characters with hyphens, then remove duplicate hyphens. If you feel like extra credit, you can strip out stopwords, too.

So "1-As Low As 10% Downpayment, Free Golf Membership!!!" becomes:

as-low-as-10-downpayment-free-gold-membership

Something like this:

function sluggify($url)
{
    # Prep string with some basic normalization
    $url = strtolower($url);
    $url = strip_tags($url);
    $url = stripslashes($url);
    $url = html_entity_decode($url);

    # Remove quotes (can't, etc.)
    $url = str_replace('\'', '', $url);

    # Replace non-alpha numeric with hyphens
    $match = '/[^a-z0-9]+/';
    $replace = '-';
    $url = preg_replace($match, $replace, $url);

    $url = trim($url, '-');

    return $url;
}

You could probably shorten it with longer regexps but it's pretty straightforward as-is. The bonus is that you can use the same function to validate the query parameter before you run a query on the database to match the title, so someone can't stick silly things into your database.