How does Stack Overflow generate its SEO-friendly URLs?

Question

What is a good complete regular expression or some other process that would take the title:

How do you change a title to be part of the URL like Stack

Answer 1

You can also use this JavaScript function for in-form generation of the slug's (this one is based on/copied from Django):

function makeSlug(urlString, filter) {
    // Changes, e.g., "Petty theft" to "petty_theft".
    // Remove all these words from the string before URLifying

    if(filter) {
        removelist = ["a", "an", "as", "at", "before", "but", "by", "for", "from",
        "is", "in", "into", "like", "of", "off", "on", "onto", "per",
        "since", "than", "the", "this", "that", "to", "up", "via", "het", "de", "een", "en",
        "with"];
    }
    else {
        removelist = [];
    }
    s = urlString;
    r = new RegExp('\\b(' + removelist.join('|') + ')\\b', 'gi');
    s = s.replace(r, '');
    s = s.replace(/[^-\w\s]/g, ''); // Remove unneeded characters
    s = s.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, ''); // Trim leading/trailing spaces
    s = s.replace(/[-\s]+/g, '-'); // Convert spaces to hyphens
    s = s.toLowerCase(); // Convert to lowercase
    return s; // Trim to first num_chars characters
}