This library provides methods to generate slugs for URLs, filenames or any other target that has a limited character set. It’s based on PHPs Transliterator class which uses the data of the CLDR to transform characters between different scripts (e.g. Cyrillic to Latin) or types (e.g. upper- to lower-case or from special characters to ASCII).
<?php
use Ausi\SlugGenerator\SlugGenerator;
$generator = new SlugGenerator;
$generator->generate('Hello Wörld!'); // Output: hello-world
$generator->generate('Καλημέρα'); // Output: kalemera
$generator->generate('фильм'); // Output: film
$generator->generate('富士山'); // Output: fu-shi-shan
$generator->generate('國語'); // Output: guo-yu
// Different valid character set, a specified locale and a delimiter
$generator = new SlugGenerator((new SlugOptions)
->setValidChars('a-zA-Z0-9')
->setLocale('de')
->setDelimiter('_')
);
$generator->generate('Äpfel und Bäume'); // Aepfel_und_BaeumeTo install the library use Composer or download the source files from GitHub.
composer require ausi/slug-generatorThere are many code snippets and some good libraries out there that create slugs, but I didn’t find anything that met my requirements. Options are often very limited which makes it hard to customize for different use cases. Some libs carry large rulesets with them that try to convert characters to ASCII, no one uses Unicode’s CLDR which is the standard for transliteration rules and many other transforms.
But most importantly no library was able to do the “correct” conversions,
like Ö-Äpfel to OE-Aepfel for German or İNATÇI to inatçı for Turkish.
Because the CLDR transliteration rules are context sensitive
they know how to correctly convert to OE-Aepfel
instead of Oe-Aepfel or OE-AEpfel.
CLDR also takes the language into account
and knows that the turkish uppercase letter I
has the lowercase form ı instead of i.
All options can be set for the generator object itself new SlugGenerator($options)
or overwritten when calling generate($text, $options).
Options can by passed as array or as SlugOptions object.
The delimiter can be any string, it is used to separate words. It gets stripped from the beginning and the end of the slug.
$generator->generate('Hello World!'); // Result: hello-world
$generator->generate('Hello World!', ['delimiter' => '_']); // Result: hello_world
$generator->generate('Hello World!', ['delimiter' => '%20']); // Result: hello%20worldValid characters that are allowed in the slug.
The range syntax is the same as in character classes of regular expressions.
For example abc, a-z0-9äöüß or \p{Ll}\-_.
$generator->generate('Hello World!'); // Result: hello-world
$generator->generate('Hello World!', ['validChars' => 'A-Z']); // Result: HELLO-WORLD
$generator->generate('Hello World!', ['validChars' => 'A-Za-z']); // Result: Hello-WorldCharacters that should be completely removed and not replaced with a delimiter.
It uses the same syntax as the validChars option.
$generator->generate("don't remove"); // Result: don-t-remove
$generator->generate("don't remove", ['ignoreChars' => "'"]); // Result: dont-removeThe locale that should be used for the Unicode transformations.
$generator->generate('Hello Wörld!'); // Result: hello-world
$generator->generate('Hello Wörld!', ['locale' => 'de']); // Result: hello-woerld
$generator->generate('Hello Wörld!', ['locale' => 'en_US']); // Result: hello-worldInternally the slug generator uses Transform Rules
to convert invalid characters to valid ones.
These rules can be customized
by setting the transforms, preTransforms or postTransforms options.
Usually setting preTransforms is desired
as it applies the custom transforms
prior to the default ones.
How Transform Rules (like Lower or ASCII)
and rule sets (like a > b; c > d;) work
is documented on the ICU website:
http://userguide.icu-project.org/transforms
$generator->generate('Damn 💩!!'); // Result: damn
$generator->generate('Damn 💩!!', ['preTransforms' => ['💩 > Ice-Cream']]); // Result: damn-ice-cream
$generator->generate('©'); // Result: c
$generator->generate('©', ['preTransforms' => ['© > Copyright']]); // Result: copyright
$generator->generate('©', ['preTransforms' => ['Hex']]); // Result: u00a9
$generator->generate('©', ['preTransforms' => ['Name']]); // Result: n-copyright-signThanks to Blackfire for sponsoring performance profiling tools for this project.