Convert any title to url slug and back from url slug to title

Question

I want to convert any title e.g. of a blog entry to a user friendly url. I used rawurlencode() to do that but it gives me a lot of strange strings like %s.

Answer 1

function url_title($str, $separator = 'dash', $lowercase = FALSE)
 {
  if ($separator == 'dash')
  {
   $search  = '_';
   $replace = '-';
  }
  else
  {
   $search  = '-';
   $replace = '_';
  }

  $trans = array(
      '&\#\d+?;'    => '',
      '&\S+?;'    => '',
      '\s+'     => $replace,
      '[^a-z0-9\-\._]'  => '',
      $replace.'+'   => $replace,
      $replace.'$'   => $replace,
      '^'.$replace   => $replace,
      '\.+$'     => ''
       );

  $str = strip_tags($str);

  foreach ($trans as $key => $val)
  {
   $str = preg_replace("#".$key."#i", $val, $str);
  }

  if ($lowercase === TRUE)
  {
   $str = strtolower($str);
  }

  return trim(stripslashes($str));
 }