Best way to generate slugs (human-readable IDs) in Rails

Question

You know, like myblog.com/posts/donald-e-knuth.

Should I do this with the built in parameterize method?

What about a plugin? I could imagine a plugin being n

Answer 1

Here is what I use:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_create :make_slug
  private

  def make_slug
    self.slug = self.name.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')
  end
end

Pretty self explanatory, although the only problem with this is if there is already the same one, it won't be name-01 or something like that.

Example:

".downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')".downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')

Outputs: -downcase-gsub-a-z1-9-chomp