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

I modified it a bit to create dashes instead of underscores, if anyone is interested:

def to_slug(param=self.slug)

    # strip the string
    ret = param.strip

    #blow away apostrophes
    ret.gsub! /['`]/, ""

    # @ --> at, and & --> and
    ret.gsub! /\s*@\s*/, " at "
    ret.gsub! /\s*&\s*/, " and "

    # replace all non alphanumeric, periods with dash
    ret.gsub! /\s*[^A-Za-z0-9\.]\s*/, '-'

    # replace underscore with dash
    ret.gsub! /[-_]{2,}/, '-'

    # convert double dashes to single
    ret.gsub! /-+/, "-"

    # strip off leading/trailing dash
    ret.gsub! /\A[-\.]+|[-\.]+\z/, ""

    ret
  end