Best way to generate slugs (human-readable IDs) in

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 nice for handling duplicate slugs, etc. Here are some popular Github plugins -- does anyone have any experience with them?

1. http://github.com/rsl/stringex/tree/master
2. http://github.com/norman/friendly_id/tree/master

Basically it seems like slugs are a totally solved problem, and I don't to reinvent the wheel.

Answer 1

In Rails you can use #parameterize

For example:

> "Foo bar`s".parameterize 
=> "foo-bar-s"

Answer 2

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 3

The main issue for my apps has been the apostrophes - rarely do you want the -s sitting out there on it's own.

class String

  def to_slug
    self.gsub(/['`]/, "").parameterize
  end

end

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

I modified it a bit to create dashes instead of underscores, if anyone is interested:

def to_slug(param=self.slug)

    # strip the string
    ret = param.strip

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

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

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

    # replace underscore with dash
    ret.gsub! /[-_]{2,}/, '-'

    # convert double dashes to single
    ret.gsub! /-+/, "-"

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

    ret
  end

Answer 6

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