Question

I have a textbox where a user puts a string like this:

"hello world! I think that __i__ am awesome (yes I am!)"

I need to create a correct URL like this:

hello-world-i-think-that-i-am-awesome-yes-i-am

How can it be done using regular expressions?

Also, is it possible to do it with Greek (for example)?

"Γεια σου κόσμε"

turns to

geia-sou-kosme

In other programming languages (Python/Ruby) I am using a translation array. Should I do the same here?

Answer 1

Try this:

function doDashes(str) {
    var re = /[^a-z0-9]+/gi; // global and case insensitive matching of non-char/non-numeric
    var re2 = /^-*|-*$/g;     // get rid of any leading/trailing dashes
    str = str.replace(re, '-');  // perform the 1st regexp
    return str.replace(re2, '').toLowerCase(); // ..aaand the second + return lowercased result
}
console.log(doDashes("hello world! I think that __i__ am awesome (yes I am!)"));
// => hello-world-I-think-that-i-am-awesome-yes-I-am

As for the greek characters, yeah I can’t think of anything else than some sort of lookup table used by another regexp.

Edit, here’s the oneliner version:
Edit, added toLowerCase():
Edit, embarrassing fix to the trailing regexp:

function doDashes2(str) {
    return str.replace(/[^a-z0-9]+/gi, '-').replace(/^-*|-*$/g, '').toLowerCase();
}