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

No, no, no. You are all so very wrong. Except for the diacritics-fu stuff, you're getting there, but what about Asian characters (shame on Ruby developers for not considering their nihonjin brethren).

Firefox and Safari both display non-ASCII characters in the URL, and frankly they look great. It is nice to support links like 'http://somewhere.com/news/read/お前たちはアホじゃないかい'.

So here's some PHP code that'll do it, but I just wrote it and haven't stress tested it.

<?php
    function slug($str)
    {
        $args = func_get_args();
        array_filter($args);  //remove blanks
        $slug = mb_strtolower(implode('-', $args));

        $real_slug = '';
        $hyphen = '';
        foreach(SU::mb_str_split($slug) as $c)
        {
            if (strlen($c) > 1 && mb_strlen($c)===1)
            {
                $real_slug .= $hyphen . $c;
                $hyphen = '';
            }
            else
            {
                switch($c)
                {
                    case '&':
                        $hyphen = $real_slug ? '-and-' : '';
                        break;
                    case 'a':
                    case 'b':
                    case 'c':
                    case 'd':
                    case 'e':
                    case 'f':
                    case 'g':
                    case 'h':
                    case 'i':
                    case 'j':
                    case 'k':
                    case 'l':
                    case 'm':
                    case 'n':
                    case 'o':
                    case 'p':
                    case 'q':
                    case 'r':
                    case 's':
                    case 't':
                    case 'u':
                    case 'v':
                    case 'w':
                    case 'x':
                    case 'y':
                    case 'z':

                    case 'A':
                    case 'B':
                    case 'C':
                    case 'D':
                    case 'E':
                    case 'F':
                    case 'G':
                    case 'H':
                    case 'I':
                    case 'J':
                    case 'K':
                    case 'L':
                    case 'M':
                    case 'N':
                    case 'O':
                    case 'P':
                    case 'Q':
                    case 'R':
                    case 'S':
                    case 'T':
                    case 'U':
                    case 'V':
                    case 'W':
                    case 'X':
                    case 'Y':
                    case 'Z':

                    case '0':
                    case '1':
                    case '2':
                    case '3':
                    case '4':
                    case '5':
                    case '6':
                    case '7':
                    case '8':
                    case '9':
                        $real_slug .= $hyphen . $c;
                        $hyphen = '';
                        break;

                    default:
                       $hyphen = $hyphen ? $hyphen : ($real_slug ? '-' : '');
                }
            }
        }
        return $real_slug;
    }

Example:

$str = "~!@#$%^&*()_+-=[]\{}|;':\",./<>?\n\r\t\x07\x00\x04 コリン ~!@#$%^&*()_+-=[]\{}|;':\",./<>?\n\r\t\x07\x00\x04 トーマス ~!@#$%^&*()_+-=[]\{}|;':\",./<>?\n\r\t\x07\x00\x04 アーノルド ~!@#$%^&*()_+-=[]\{}|;':\",./<>?\n\r\t\x07\x00\x04";
echo slug($str);

Outputs: コリン-and-トーマス-and-アーノルド

The '-and-' is because &'s get changed to '-and-'.

Answer 2

You can also use this JavaScript function for in-form generation of the slug's (this one is based on/copied from Django):

function makeSlug(urlString, filter) {
    // Changes, e.g., "Petty theft" to "petty_theft".
    // Remove all these words from the string before URLifying

    if(filter) {
        removelist = ["a", "an", "as", "at", "before", "but", "by", "for", "from",
        "is", "in", "into", "like", "of", "off", "on", "onto", "per",
        "since", "than", "the", "this", "that", "to", "up", "via", "het", "de", "een", "en",
        "with"];
    }
    else {
        removelist = [];
    }
    s = urlString;
    r = new RegExp('\\b(' + removelist.join('|') + ')\\b', 'gi');
    s = s.replace(r, '');
    s = s.replace(/[^-\w\s]/g, ''); // Remove unneeded characters
    s = s.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, ''); // Trim leading/trailing spaces
    s = s.replace(/[-\s]+/g, '-'); // Convert spaces to hyphens
    s = s.toLowerCase(); // Convert to lowercase
    return s; // Trim to first num_chars characters
}

Answer 3

Assuming that your model class has a title attribute, you can simply override the to_param method within the model, like this:

def to_param
  title.downcase.gsub(/ /, '-')
end

This Railscast episode has all the details. You can also ensure that the title only contains valid characters using this:

validates_format_of :title, :with => /^[a-z0-9-]+$/,
                    :message => 'can only contain letters, numbers and hyphens'

Answer 4

I am not familiar with Ruby on Rails, but the following is (untested) PHP code. You can probably translate this very quickly to Ruby on Rails if you find it useful.

$sURL = "This is a title to convert to URL-format. It has 1 number in it!";
// To lower-case
$sURL = strtolower($sURL);

// Replace all non-word characters with spaces
$sURL = preg_replace("/\W+/", " ", $sURL);

// Remove trailing spaces (so we won't end with a separator)
$sURL = trim($sURL);

// Replace spaces with separators (hyphens)
$sURL = str_replace(" ", "-", $sURL);

echo $sURL;
// outputs: this-is-a-title-to-convert-to-url-format-it-has-1-number-in-it

I hope this helps.

Answer 5

I know it's very old question but since most of the browsers now support unicode urls I found a great solution in XRegex that converts everything except letters (in all languages to '-').

That can be done in several programming languages.

The pattern is \\p{^L}+ and then you just need to use it to replace all non letters to '-'.

Working example in node.js with xregex module.

var text = 'This ! can @ have # several $ letters % from different languages such as עברית or Español';

var slugRegEx = XRegExp('((?!\\d)\\p{^L})+', 'g');

var slug = XRegExp.replace(text, slugRegEx, '-').toLowerCase();

console.log(slug) ==> "this-can-have-several-letters-from-different-languages-such-as-עברית-or-español"

Answer 6

I liked the way this is done without using regular expressions, so I ported it to PHP. I just added a function called is_between to check characters:

function is_between($val, $min, $max)
{
    $val = (int) $val; $min = (int) $min; $max = (int) $max;

    return ($val >= $min && $val <= $max);
}

function international_char_to_ascii($char)
{
    if (mb_strpos('àåáâäãåa', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'a';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('èéêëe', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'e';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('ìíîïi', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'i';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('òóôõö', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'o';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('ùúûüuu', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'u';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('çccc', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'c';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('zzž', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'z';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('ssšs', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 's';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('ñn', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'n';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('ýÿ', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'y';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('gg', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'g';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('r', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'r';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('l', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'l';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('d', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'd';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('ß', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'ss';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('Þ', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'th';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('h', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'h';
    }

    if (mb_strpos('j', $char) !== false)
    {
        return 'j';
    }
    return '';
}

function url_friendly_title($url_title)
{
    if (empty($url_title))
    {
        return '';
    }

    $url_title = mb_strtolower($url_title);

    $url_title_max_length   = 80;
    $url_title_length       = mb_strlen($url_title);
    $url_title_friendly     = '';
    $url_title_dash_added   = false;
    $url_title_char = '';

    for ($i = 0; $i < $url_title_length; $i++)
    {
        $url_title_char     = mb_substr($url_title, $i, 1);

        if (strlen($url_title_char) == 2)
        {
            $url_title_ascii    = ord($url_title_char[0]) * 256 + ord($url_title_char[1]) . "\r\n";
        }
        else
        {
            $url_title_ascii    = ord($url_title_char);
        }

        if (is_between($url_title_ascii, 97, 122) || is_between($url_title_ascii, 48, 57))
        {
            $url_title_friendly .= $url_title_char;

            $url_title_dash_added = false;
        }
        elseif(is_between($url_title_ascii, 65, 90))
        {
            $url_title_friendly .= chr(($url_title_ascii | 32));

            $url_title_dash_added = false;
        }
        elseif($url_title_ascii == 32 || $url_title_ascii == 44 || $url_title_ascii == 46 || $url_title_ascii == 47 || $url_title_ascii == 92 || $url_title_ascii == 45 || $url_title_ascii == 47 || $url_title_ascii == 95 || $url_title_ascii == 61)
        {
            if (!$url_title_dash_added && mb_strlen($url_title_friendly) > 0)
            {
                $url_title_friendly .= chr(45);

                $url_title_dash_added = true;
            }
        }
        else if ($url_title_ascii >= 128)
        {
            $url_title_previous_length = mb_strlen($url_title_friendly);

            $url_title_friendly .= international_char_to_ascii($url_title_char);

            if ($url_title_previous_length != mb_strlen($url_title_friendly))
            {
                $url_title_dash_added = false;
            }
        }

        if ($i == $url_title_max_length)
        {
            break;
        }
    }

    if ($url_title_dash_added)
    {
        return mb_substr($url_title_friendly, 0, -1);
    }
    else
    {
        return $url_title_friendly;
    }
}