Slugify and Character Transliteration in C#

Question

I'm trying to translate the following slugify method from PHP to C#: http://snipplr.com/view/22741/slugify-a-string-in-php/

Edit: For the sake of convenience, here the code from above:

/**
 * Modifies a string to remove al non ASCII characters and spaces.
 */
static public function slugify($text)
{
    // replace non letter or digits by -
    $text = preg_replace('~[^\\pL\d]+~u', '-', $text);

    // trim
    $text = trim($text, '-');

    // transliterate
    if (function_exists('iconv'))
    {
        $text = iconv('utf-8', 'us-ascii//TRANSLIT', $text);
    }

    // lowercase
    $text = strtolower($text);

    // remove unwanted characters
    $text = preg_replace('~[^-\w]+~', '', $text);

    if (empty($text))
    {
        return 'n-a';
    }

    return $text;
}

I got no probleming coding the rest except I can not find the C# equivalent of the following line of PHP code:

$text = iconv('utf-8', 'us-ascii//TRANSLIT', $text);

Edit: Purpose of this is to translate non-ASCII characters such as Reformáció Genfi Emlékműve Előtt into reformacio-genfi-emlekmuve-elott

Answer 1

I would also like to add that the //TRANSLIT removes the apostrophes and that @jxac solution doesn't address that. I'm not sure why but by first encoding it to Cyrillic and then to ASCII you get a similar behavior as //TRANSLIT.

var str = "éåäöíØ";
var noApostrophes = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(Encoding.GetEncoding("Cyrillic").GetBytes(str)); 

=> "eaaoiO"

Answer 2

conversion to string:

byte[] unicodeBytes = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(str);
byte[] asciiBytes = Encoding.Convert(Encoding.Unicode, Encoding.ASCII, unicodeBytes);
string asciiString = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(asciiBytes);

conversion to bytes:

byte[] ascii = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(str);

@Thomas Levesque is right, will get encoded by the output stream...

to remove the diacritics (accent marks), you can use the String.Normalize function, as detailed here:

http://www.siao2.com/2007/05/14/2629747.aspx

that should take care of most of the cases (where the glyph is really a character plus an accent mark). for an even more aggressive char matching (to take care of cases like the Scandinavian slashed o [Ø], digraphs, and other exotic glyphs), there's the table approach:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/UnicodeNormalization.aspx

this includes around 1,000 symbol mappings in addition to the normalization.

(note, all punctuation is removed by the regex replace in your example)

Answer 3

There is a .NET library for transliteration on codeplex - unidecode. It generally does the trick using Unidecode tables ported from python.