Question

i have this function which generates a seo friendly url from a string :

 function seo_titleinurl_generate($title)
         {


            $title=substr($title,0,160);

            $title = ereg_replace(" ", "-", $title); // replace spaces by "-"

            $title = ereg_replace("á", "a", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("í", "i", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("ó", "o", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("ú", "u", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("ñ", "n", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = ereg_replace("Ñ", "n", $title); // replace special chars

            $title = strtolower(trim($title)); // lowercase
            $title = preg_replace("/([^a-zA-Z0-9_-])/",'',$title); // only keep  standard latin letters and numbers, hyphens and dashes

           if($title=="" or $title=="-"){
           $mr=rand(1,99999);
           $mt=time();
           $title=$mr.$mt;
         }

             return $title;
     }

But in some cases when the string has multiple spaces like : the most (3 spaces here) nice pranks!
it’s generates : the-most—nice-pranks

i want it to ignore many spaces and make them only one dash.

Thanks

Answer 1

I think this may be a little faster than the previous answer because it won’t mess around with single spaces (I could be wrong):

$title = preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', $title);