Question

I am trying to turn a standard wordpress title into a slug, that makes all characters lowercase, replaces spaces with dashes, and removes all “&” symbols that are in the titles.

So lets use this title as an example: “Identity & Wayfinding“

Here is my PHP:

<?php 
$title = get_the_title(); 
$lower = strtolower($title);
$noDash = str_replace(' ', '-', $lower);
$noAnd = str_replace('&', '', $noDash);
echo $noAnd;
?>

This turns my title into “identity-#038;-wayfinding“

The lowercase conversion worked, but the replacing of the”&” with nothing isnot working . It is converting the “&” into an HTML special character. Any idea how I can simply replace the “&” with a blank, but also REMOVE the dash after that so the final title would be: “identity-wayfinding”?

Answer 1

If you want a slug, there are plenty of utilities which will do it for you, but neither htmlentities or urlencode is correct. Doctrine 1.2 included a urlizer class with a set of static functions including urilize which will accomplish the behavior you desire in a more robust manner (handles UTF-8 and unaccenting correctly, etc.)

It can be found here

If you want something less robust but far simpler:

function slugify($sluggable)
{
    $sluggable = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\/_|+ -]/", '', $sluggable);
    $sluggable = trim($sluggable, '-');
    if( function_exists('mb_strtolower') ) { 
        $sluggable = mb_strtolower( $sluggable );
    } else { 
        $sluggable = strtolower( $sluggable );
    }
    $sluggable = preg_replace("/[\/_|+ -]+/", '-', $sluggable);

    return $sluggable;
}

That’ll strip non-alphanumeric characters (but also accented characters) and make spaces, + signs, and hyphens into hyphens.