Question

I’d like to store strings also in a more queryable slug-like format to the database, forcing it to lowercase, replacing the accented letters with their latin counterparts (ä -> a, ö -> o, ç -> c etc.) and replacing other special characters with e.g. dashes. Is there a standard for these kind of format? What would be preferable means to achieve it in Java?

Answer 1

This is the solution that I’ve found working best so far:

return Normalizer
    .normalize(src.trim().toLowerCase(Locale.ENGLISH),
        Normalizer.Form.NFD)
    .replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "")
    .replaceAll("[^\\p{ASCII}]+", "-")
    .replaceAll("[^a-z0-9]+", "-").replaceAll("(^-|-$)+", "");

This converts: ¿Qué? to que, Cool!!!!1 to cool-1 and åæø to a.