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

If you are using Rails edge, you can rely on Inflector.parametrize - here's the example from the documentation:

  class Person
    def to_param
      "#{id}-#{name.parameterize}"
    end
  end

  @person = Person.find(1)
  # => #

  <%= link_to(@person.name, person_path(@person)) %>
  # => Donald E. Knuth

Also if you need to handle more exotic characters such as accents (éphémère) in previous version of Rails, you can use a mixture of PermalinkFu and DiacriticsFu:

DiacriticsFu::escape("éphémère")
=> "ephemere"

DiacriticsFu::escape("räksmörgås")
=> "raksmorgas"