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 found the Unidecode gem to be much too heavyweight, loading nearly 200 YAML files, for what I needed. I knew iconv had some support for the basic translations, and while it isn't perfect, it's built in and fairly lightweight. This is what I came up with:

require 'iconv' # unless you're in Rails or already have it loaded
def slugify(text)
  text.downcase!
  text = Iconv.conv('ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', 'UTF8', text)

  # Replace whitespace characters with hyphens, avoiding duplication
  text.gsub! /\s+/, '-'

  # Remove anything that isn't alphanumeric or a hyphen
  text.gsub! /[^a-z0-9-]+/, ''

  # Chomp trailing hyphens
  text.chomp '-'
end

Obviously you should probably add it as an instance method on any objects you'll be running it on, but for clarity, I didn't.