Any Easy Function To SEO Text for Link PHP

Question

Hey, I'm just wondering if there's any easy function to make text suitable to be in a link, say I have a bunch of caps, weird characters etc and I want it all to be lowercase with "-" instead of spaces, is there a function to do that or do I have to create my own?

Answer 1

Try this one, from snipplr:

function slug($str)
{
    $str = strtolower(trim($str));
    $str = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9-]/', '-', $str);
    $str = preg_replace('/-+/', "-", $str);
    return $str;
}

Answer 2

$url = "http://hellO.com/you re here/right.html";    
//get rid of spaces
$url = str_replace(" ", "-", $url);
//make lowercase
$url = strtolower($url);

This will give you "http://hello.com/you-re-here/right.html"

Follow this logic for dealing with the weird characters.

Answer 3

You can try preg_replace (http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php), which uses regular expressions, combined with strtolower. That makes everything lowercase, then converts anything which is not a lowercase letter (such as a space) into a hyphen.

$str = preg_replace("/[^a-z]/", "-", strtolower($str));