the html blog

When I started implementing mod_rewrite in websites I had a problem in PHP as how to make a SEO friendly URL. All tutorials were geared towards how to implement mod_rewrite, about modifying .htaccess files, but none treated how to make the urls friendly with dynamic content. For example I have a news section which are pulled from the database, but how can I make the URL friendly with the title.

For example, my problem was to convert titles like "Barca rejects FIFA statement on Olympics row" into "barca-rejects-fifa-statement-on-olympics-row.html". The trick has to work also with french titles (I'am sure my friends at Nexen will appreciate ;-)) like "Guantanamo: le chauffeur de Ben Laden plaide non coupable à l'ouverture de son procès" into "guantanamo-le-chauffeur-de-ben-laden-plaide-non-coupable-a-l-ouverture-de-son-proces.html", removing all french accentuated characters.

Hopefully I came across this function which I think might help you too :

 
function friendlyURL($string){
	$string = preg_replace("`\[.*\]`U","",$string);
	$string = preg_replace('`&(amp;)?#?[a-z0-9]+;`i','-',$string);
	$string = htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT, 'utf-8');
	$string = preg_replace( "`&([a-z])(acute|uml|circ|grave|ring|cedil|slash|tilde|caron|lig|quot|rsquo);`i","\\1", $string );
	$string = preg_replace( array("`[^a-z0-9]`i","`[-]+`") , "-", $string);
	return strtolower(trim($string, '-'));
}
 

Use :

 
$myFriendlyURL = friendlyURL("Barca rejects FIFA statement on Olympics row");
echo $myFriendlyURL; // will echo barca-rejects-fifa-statement-on-olympics-row
 

You just have to concatenate anything you want with the string afterwards. For french users, make sure your string is encoded in UTF-8 else it won't work.

If you're using the Smarty templating engine I made a little modifier which you can download. Extract the zip file in your Smarty/libs/plugins/ folder and to use it in your templates :

 
{"Barca rejects FIFA statement on Olympics row" | friendlyURL}
 

Or if your string is in a variable :

 
{$yourString | friendlyURL}