PHP urlize function

Question

Hello guys,

I'm using this function on my website to transform user input into acceptable URL:

function urlize($url) { 
$search = array('/[^a-z0-9]/', '/--+/', '/^-+/', '/-+$/' ); 
$replace = array( '-', '-', '', ''); 
return preg_replace($search, $replace, utf2ascii($url)); 
}     
function utf2ascii($string) { 
$iso88591  = "\\xE0\\xE1\\xE2\\xE3\\xE4\\xE5\\xE6\\xE7"; 
$iso88591 .= "\\xE8\\xE9\\xEA\\xEB\\xEC\\xED\\xEE\\xEF"; 
$iso88591 .= "\\xF0\\xF1\\xF2\\xF3\\xF4\\xF5\\xF6\\xF7"; 
$iso88591 .= "\\xF8\\xF9\\xFA\\xFB\\xFC\\xFD\\xFE\\xFF"; 
$ascii = "aaaaaaaceeeeiiiidnooooooouuuuyyy"; 
return strtr(mb_strtolower(utf8_decode($string), 'ISO-8859-1'),$iso88591,$ascii); 
}

I'm having a problem with it though, with numbers. For some reason when I try:

echo urlize("test 23342");

I get "test-eiioe". Why is that and how can I fix it?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

Your utf2ascii function is wrong, that's the one turning test 23342 into test eiioe.

Why don't you use iconv to do the conversion from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1? ie. use iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $url);

Answer 2

Hey, it looks like you are trying to create a slug. If so, this is the function I use/suggest:

function slug( $string ) {
    return strtolower( preg_replace( array( '/[^-a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '/[\s]/' ), array( '', '-' ), $string ) );
}

Answer 3

The problem is in your utf2ascii. I suggest you to use iconv() function instead.

iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//IGNORE", $string);

The //IGNORE part in the output encoding means to ignore any character it can't translate. The bad news is you lose all accented characters. To keep them, you can use //TRANSLIT.

Then, you can use strtolower and some regexp to eliminate non-alphanumeric characters (or to replace them with -).

If you want to encode any data, there is also urlencode(), but this won't make you nice links.

Answer 4

What's wrong with urlencode()?