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

This is a good function:

function friendlyURL($string) {
    setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'en_US.UTF8');
    $string = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', $string);
    $string = str_replace(' ', '-', $string);
    $string = preg_replace('/\\s+/', '-', $string);
    $string = strtolower($string);
    return $string;
}