Question

I am trying to create slugs. My string is like this: $string='möbel#*-jérôme-mp3-how?';

Step: 1

First, I want to remove special characters, non-alphanumeric and non-latin characters from this string.

Like this: $string='möbel-jérôme-mp3-how';

Previously, I used to have only english characters in the string.

So, I used to do like this: $string = preg_replace("([^a-z0-9])", "-", $string);

However, since I also want to retain foreign characters, this is not working.

Step: 2

Then, I want to remove the all the words that have one or more numbers in them.

In this example string, I want to remove the word mp3 as it contains one or more numbers.

So, the final string looks like this: $string='möbel-jérôme-how';

I used to do like this:

$words = explode('-',$string);
$result = array();

foreach($words as $word) 
{
if( ($word ==preg_replace("([^a-z])", "-", $word)) && strlen($word)>2)  
$result[]=$word;
}
$string = implode(' ',$result);

This does not work now as it contains foreign characters.

Answer 1

In PHP, you have access to Unicode properties:

$result = preg_replace('/[^\p{L}\p{N}-]+/u', '', $subject);

will do step 1 for you. (\p{L} matches any Unicode letter, \p{N} matches any Unicode digit).

Removing words with digits is just as easy:

$result2 = preg_replace('/\b\w*\d\w*\b-?/', '', $result);

(\b matches the start and end of a word).