How can I create a SEO friendly dash-delimited url from a string?

Question

Take a string such as:

In C#: How do I add \"Quotes\" around string in a comma delimited list of strings?

and convert it to:

Answer 1

Here's a solution for php:

function make_uri($input, $max_length) {
  if (function_exists('iconv')) {  
    $input = @iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $input);  
  }

  $lower = strtolower($input);


  $without_special = preg_replace_all('/[^a-z0-9 ]/', '', $input);
  $tokens = preg_split('/ +/', $without_special);

  $result = '';

  for ($tokens as $token) {
    if (strlen($result.'-'.$token) > $max_length+1) {
      break;
    }

    $result .= '-'.$token;       
  }

  return substr($result, 1);
}

usage:

echo make_uri('In C#: How do I add "Quotes" around string in a ...', 500);

Unless you need the uris to be typable, they don't need to be small. But you should specify a maximum so that the urls work well with proxies etc.