How to handle diacritics (accents) when rewriting 'pretty URLs'

Question

I rewrite URLs to include the title of user generated travelblogs.

I do this for both readability of URLs and SEO purposes.

 http://www.example.com/gall         


        

Answer 1

Nice topic, I had the same problem a while ago.
Here's how I fixed it:

function title2url($string=null){
 // return if empty
 if(empty($string)) return false;

 // replace spaces by "-"
 // convert accents to html entities
 $string=htmlentities(utf8_decode(str_replace(' ', '-', $string)));

 // remove the accent from the letter
 $string=preg_replace(array('@&([a-zA-Z]){1,2}(acute|grave|circ|tilde|uml|ring|elig|zlig|slash|cedil|strok|lig){1};@', '@&[euro]{1};@'), array('${1}', 'E'), $string);

 // now, everything but alphanumeric and -_ can be removed
 // aso remove double dashes
 $string=preg_replace(array('@[^a-zA-Z0-9\-_]@', '@[\-]{2,}@'), array('', '-'), html_entity_decode($string));
}

Here's how my function works:

1. Convert it to html entities
2. Strip the accents
3. Remove all remaining weird chars