URL Slugify alrogithm in C#?

Question

So I have searched and browsed through the slug tag on SO and only found two compelling solution:

• Slugify and Character Transliteration in C#
• How to convert super- or subscript to normal text in C#

Which are but partial solution to the problem. I could manually code this up myself but I'm surprised that there isn't already a solution out there yet.

So, is there a slugify alrogithm implementation in C# and/or .NET that properly address latin characters, unicode and various other language issues properly?

Answer 1

The "algorithm" I've seen sofar is just the use of a table of from/to replacements, and a way to filter out the remaining characters (for instance, the entire chinese "alphabet").

If you use Encoding.ASCII.GetString(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(unicodeString)), you'll filter out any character except the base ASCII characters. Other characters get converted to question marks. Something like this:

Dictionary<char, char> lReplaceValues = new Dictionary<char, char>();
lReplaceValues['ä'] = 'a';
lReplaceValues['ö'] = 'o';
lReplaceValues['ë'] = 'e';

string lSlug = "Hëllö wórld!";
foreach (KeyValuePair<char, char> lReplaceValue in lReplaceValues)
{
    lSlug = lSlug.Replace(lReplaceValue.Key, lReplaceValue.Value);
}
lSlug = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(lSlug));

There has to be a more elegant way, btw.

Answer 2

http://predicatet.blogspot.com/2009/04/improved-c-slug-generator-or-how-to.html

Answer 3

One problem I've had with slugification (new word!) is collisions. If I have a blog post, for instance, called "Stack-Overflow" and one called "Stack Overflow", the slugs of those two titles are the same. Therefore, my slug generator usually has to involve the database in some way. This might be why you don't see more generic solutions out there.