How to convert a nice page title into a valid URL string?

imagine a page Title string in any given language (english, arabic, japanese etc) containing several words in UTF-8. Example:

$stringRAW = "Blues & μπλουζ Bliss's ブルース Schön";

Now this actually needs to be converted into something thats a valid portion of a URL of that page:

$stringURL = "blues-μπλουζ-bliss-ブルース-schön"

just check out this link This works on my server too!

Q1. What characters are allowed as valid URL these days? I remember having seen whol arabic strings sitting on the browser and i tested it on my apache 2 and all worked fine.

I guesse it must become: $stringURL = "blues-blows-bliss-black"

Q2. What existing php functions do you know that encode/convert these UTF-8 strings correctl开发者_如何学Pythony for URL ripping them off of any invalid chars?

I guesse that at least: 1. spaces should be converted into dashes -

2. delete invalid characters? which are they? @ and '&'?

3. converts all letters to lower case (or are capitcal letters valid in urls?)

Thanks: your suggestions are much appreciated!

this is solution which I use:

$text = 'Nevalidní Český text';
$text = preg_replace('/[^\\pL0-9]+/u', '-', $text);
$text = trim($text, "-");
$text = iconv("utf-8", "us-ascii//TRANSLIT", $text);
$text = preg_replace('/[^-a-z0-9]+/i', '', $text);

Capitals in URL's are not a problem, but if you want the text to be lowercase then simply add $text = strtolower($text); at the end :-).

I would use:

$stringURL = str_replace(' ', '-', $stringURL); // Converts spaces to dashes
$stringURL = urlencode($stringURL);

$stringURL = preg_replace('~[^a-z ]~', '', str_replace(' ', '-', $stringRAW));

Check this method: http://www.whatstyle.net/articles/52/generate_unique_slugs_in_cakephp

pick the title of your webpage $title = "mytitle#$3%#$5345"; simply urlencode it

$url = urlencode($title);

you dont need to worry about small details but remember to identify your url request its best to use a unique id prefix in url such as /389894/sdojfsodjf , during routing process you can use id 389894 to get the topic sdojfsodjf .

Here is a short & handy one that does the trick for me

$title = trim(strtolower($title));  // lower string, removes white spaces and linebreaks at the start/end
$title = preg_replace('#[^a-z0-9\s-]#',null, $title); // remove all unwanted chars
$title = preg_replace('#[\s-]+#','-', $title); // replace white spaces and - with - (otherwise you end up with ---)

and of course you need to handle umlauts, currency signs and so forth depending on the possible input