Replace all spaces and special symbols with dash in URL using PHP language

Question

How to replace spaces and dashes when they appear together with only dash in PHP?

e.g below is my URL

http://kjd.case.150/1 BHK+Balcony- 700+ sqft. spacious apartmetn Bandra Wes

In this I want to replace all special characters with dash in PHP. In the URL there is already one dash after "balcony". If I replace the dash with a special character, then it becomes two dashes because there's already one dash in the URL and I want only 1 dash.

Answer 1

Something like this:

str_replace('- ','-',$url);

Answer 2

If there could be max one space surrounding the hyphen you can use the answer by John. If there could be more than one space you can try using preg_replace:

$str = preg_replace('/\s*-\s*/','-',$str);

This would replace even a - not surrounded with any spaces with - !!

To make it a bit more efficient you could do:

$str = preg_replace('/\s+-\s*|\s*-\s+/','-',$str);

Now this would ensure a - has at least one space surrounding it while its being replaced.

Answer 3

I'd say you may be want it other way. Not "spaces" but every non-alphanumeric character. Because there can be other characters, disallowed in the URl (+ sign, for example, which is used as a space replacement)

So, to make a valid url from a free-form text

$url = preg_replace("![^a-z0-9]+!i", "-", $url);

Answer 4

This should do it for you

strtolower(str_replace(array(' ', ' '), '-', preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9 s]/', '', trim($string))));