How does Stack Overflow generate its SEO-friendly

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 Overflow?

and turn it into

how-do-you-change-a-title-to-be-part-of-the-url-like-stack-overflow

that is used in the SEO-friendly URLs on Stack Overflow?

The development environment I am using is Ruby on Rails, but if there are some other platform-specific solutions (.NET, PHP, Django), I would love to see those too.

I am sure I (or another reader) will come across the same problem on a different platform down the line.

I am using custom routes, and I mainly want to know how to alter the string to all special characters are removed, it's all lowercase, and all whitespace is replaced.

Answer 1

Brian's code, in Ruby:

title.downcase.strip.gsub(/\ /, '-').gsub(/[^\w\-]/, '')

downcase turns the string to lowercase, strip removes leading and trailing whitespace, the first gsub call globally substitutes spaces with dashes, and the second removes everything that isn't a letter or a dash.

Answer 2

Here's how we do it. Note that there are probably more edge conditions than you realize at first glance.

This is the second version, unrolled for 5x more performance (and yes, I benchmarked it). I figured I'd optimize it because this function can be called hundreds of times per page.

/// <summary>
/// Produces optional, URL-friendly version of a title, "like-this-one". 
/// hand-tuned for speed, reflects performance refactoring contributed
/// by John Gietzen (user otac0n) 
/// </summary>
public static string URLFriendly(string title)
{
    if (title == null) return "";

    const int maxlen = 80;
    int len = title.Length;
    bool prevdash = false;
    var sb = new StringBuilder(len);
    char c;

    for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
    {
        c = title[i];
        if ((c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') || (c >= '0' && c <= '9'))
        {
            sb.Append(c);
            prevdash = false;
        }
        else if (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z')
        {
            // tricky way to convert to lowercase
            sb.Append((char)(c | 32));
            prevdash = false;
        }
        else if (c == ' ' || c == ',' || c == '.' || c == '/' || 
            c == '\\' || c == '-' || c == '_' || c == '=')
        {
            if (!prevdash && sb.Length > 0)
            {
                sb.Append('-');
                prevdash = true;
            }
        }
        else if ((int)c >= 128)
        {
            int prevlen = sb.Length;
            sb.Append(RemapInternationalCharToAscii(c));
            if (prevlen != sb.Length) prevdash = false;
        }
        if (i == maxlen) break;
    }

    if (prevdash)
        return sb.ToString().Substring(0, sb.Length - 1);
    else
        return sb.ToString();
}

To see the previous version of the code this replaced (but is functionally equivalent to, and 5x faster), view revision history of this post (click the date link).

Also, the RemapInternationalCharToAscii method source code can be found here.

Answer 3

Here's my (slower, but fun to write) version of Jeff's code:

public static string URLFriendly(string title)
{
    char? prevRead = null,
        prevWritten = null;

    var seq = 
        from c in title
        let norm = RemapInternationalCharToAscii(char.ToLowerInvariant(c).ToString())[0]
        let keep = char.IsLetterOrDigit(norm)
        where prevRead.HasValue || keep
        let replaced = keep ? norm
            :  prevWritten != '-' ? '-'
            :  (char?)null
        where replaced != null
        let s = replaced + (prevRead == null ? ""
            : norm == '#' && "cf".Contains(prevRead.Value) ? "sharp"
            : norm == '+' ? "plus"
            : "")
        let _ = prevRead = norm
        from written in s
        let __ = prevWritten = written
        select written;

    const int maxlen = 80;  
    return string.Concat(seq.Take(maxlen)).TrimEnd('-');
}

public static string RemapInternationalCharToAscii(string text)
{
    var seq = text.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD)
        .Where(c => CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory(c) != UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark);

    return string.Concat(seq).Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormC);
}

My test string:

" I love C#, F#, C++, and... Crème brûlée!!! They see me codin'... they hatin'... tryin' to catch me codin' dirty... "

Answer 4

Here is my version of Jeff's code. I've made the following changes:

• The hyphens were appended in such a way that one could be added, and then need removing as it was the last character in the string. That is, we never want “my-slug-”. This means an extra string allocation to remove it on this edge case. I’ve worked around this by delay-hyphening. If you compare my code to Jeff’s the logic for this is easy to follow.
• His approach is purely lookup based and missed a lot of characters I found in examples while researching on Stack Overflow. To counter this, I first peform a normalisation pass (AKA collation mentioned in Meta Stack Overflow question Non US-ASCII characters dropped from full (profile) URL), and then ignore any characters outside the acceptable ranges. This works most of the time...
• ... For when it doesn’t I’ve also had to add a lookup table. As mentioned above, some characters don’t map to a low ASCII value when normalised. Rather than drop these I’ve got a manual list of exceptions that is doubtless full of holes, but it is better than nothing. The normalisation code was inspired by Jon Hanna’s great post in Stack Overflow question How can I remove accents on a string?.

• The case conversion is now also optional.

  public static class Slug
  {
      public static string Create(bool toLower, params string[] values)
      {
          return Create(toLower, String.Join("-", values));
      }
  
      /// <summary>
      /// Creates a slug.
      /// References:
      /// http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/tr15-34.html
      /// https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7435/non-us-ascii-characters-dropped-from-full-profile-url/7696#7696
      /// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25259/how-do-you-include-a-webpage-title-as-part-of-a-webpage-url/25486#25486
      /// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3769457/how-can-i-remove-accents-on-a-string
      /// </summary>
      /// <param name="toLower"></param>
      /// <param name="normalised"></param>
      /// <returns></returns>
      public static string Create(bool toLower, string value)
      {
          if (value == null)
              return "";
  
          var normalised = value.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormKD);
  
          const int maxlen = 80;
          int len = normalised.Length;
          bool prevDash = false;
          var sb = new StringBuilder(len);
          char c;
  
          for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
          {
              c = normalised[i];
              if ((c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') || (c >= '0' && c <= '9'))
              {
                  if (prevDash)
                  {
                      sb.Append('-');
                      prevDash = false;
                  }
                  sb.Append(c);
              }
              else if (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z')
              {
                  if (prevDash)
                  {
                      sb.Append('-');
                      prevDash = false;
                  }
                  // Tricky way to convert to lowercase
                  if (toLower)
                      sb.Append((char)(c | 32));
                  else
                      sb.Append(c);
              }
              else if (c == ' ' || c == ',' || c == '.' || c == '/' || c == '\\' || c == '-' || c == '_' || c == '=')
              {
                  if (!prevDash && sb.Length > 0)
                  {
                      prevDash = true;
                  }
              }
              else
              {
                  string swap = ConvertEdgeCases(c, toLower);
  
                  if (swap != null)
                  {
                      if (prevDash)
                      {
                          sb.Append('-');
                          prevDash = false;
                      }
                      sb.Append(swap);
                  }
              }
  
              if (sb.Length == maxlen)
                  break;
          }
          return sb.ToString();
      }
  
      static string ConvertEdgeCases(char c, bool toLower)
      {
          string swap = null;
          switch (c)
          {
              case 'ı':
                  swap = "i";
                  break;
              case 'ł':
                  swap = "l";
                  break;
              case 'Ł':
                  swap = toLower ? "l" : "L";
                  break;
              case 'đ':
                  swap = "d";
                  break;
              case 'ß':
                  swap = "ss";
                  break;
              case 'ø':
                  swap = "o";
                  break;
              case 'Þ':
                  swap = "th";
                  break;
          }
          return swap;
      }
  }
  

For more details, the unit tests, and an explanation of why Facebook's URL scheme is a little smarter than Stack Overflows, I've got an expanded version of this on my blog.

Answer 5

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)
  # => #<Person id: 1, name: "Donald E. Knuth">

  <%= link_to(@person.name, person_path(@person)) %>
  # => <a href="/person/1-donald-e-knuth">Donald E. Knuth</a>

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"

Answer 6

You will want to setup a custom route to point the URL to the controller that will handle it. Since you are using Ruby on Rails, here is an introduction in using their routing engine.

In Ruby, you will need a regular expression like you already know and here is the regular expression to use:

def permalink_for(str)
    str.gsub(/[^\w\/]|[!\(\)\.]+/, ' ').strip.downcase.gsub(/\ +/, '-')
end