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 know this question has some time now. However I see some relatively new answers.

Saving the slug on the database is problematic, and you save redundant information that is already there. If you think about it, there is no reason for saving the slug. The slug should be logic, not data.

I wrote a post following this reasoning, and hope is of some help.

http://blog.ereslibre.es/?p=343

Answer 2

Here is what I use:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_create :make_slug
  private

  def make_slug
    self.slug = self.name.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')
  end
end

Pretty self explanatory, although the only problem with this is if there is already the same one, it won't be name-01 or something like that.

Example:

".downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')".downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')

Outputs: -downcase-gsub-a-z1-9-chomp

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

The Unidecoder gem hasn't been updated since 2007.

I'd recommend the stringex gem, which includes the functionality of the Unidecoder gem.

https://github.com/rsl/stringex

Looking at it's source code, it seems to repackage the Unidecoder source code and add new functionality.

Answer 5

I use the following, which will

• translate & --> "and" and @ --> "at"
• doesn't insert an underscore in place of an apostrophe, so "foo's" --> "foos"
• doesn't include double-underscores
• doesn't create slug that begins or ends with an underscore

  def to_slug
    #strip the string
    ret = self.strip

    #blow away apostrophes
    ret.gsub! /['`]/,""

    # @ --> at, and & --> and
    ret.gsub! /\s*@\s*/, " at "
    ret.gsub! /\s*&\s*/, " and "

    #replace all non alphanumeric, underscore or periods with underscore
     ret.gsub! /\s*[^A-Za-z0-9\.\-]\s*/, '_'  

     #convert double underscores to single
     ret.gsub! /_+/,"_"

     #strip off leading/trailing underscore
     ret.gsub! /\A[_\.]+|[_\.]+\z/,""

     ret
  end

so, for example:

>> s = "mom & dad @home!"
=> "mom & dad @home!"
>> s.to_slug
> "mom_and_dad_at_home"

Answer 6

We use to_slug http://github.com/ludo/to_slug/tree/master. Does everything we need it to do (escaping 'funky characters'). Hope this helps.

EDIT: Seems to be breaking my link, sorry about that.