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

With Rails 3, I've created an initializer, slug.rb, in which I've put the following code:

class String
  def to_slug
    ActiveSupport::Inflector.transliterate(self.downcase).gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+/, '-').gsub(/-{2,}/, '-').gsub(/^-|-$/, '')
  end
end

Then I use it anywhere I want in the code, it is defined for any string.

The transliterate transforms things like é,á,ô into e,a,o. As I am developing a site in portuguese, that matters.