PHP code to slugify strings into neat URLs

slugify-string.php

<?php
function slugify($string) {
    $string = transliterator_transliterate("Any-Latin; NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; NFC; [:Punctuation:] Remove; Lower();", $string);
    $string = preg_replace('/[-\s]+/', '-', $string);
    return trim($string, '-');
}

echo slugify("Hello Wörld! Καλημέρα. Привет, 1-й ёжик!. 富士山. 國語");
?>

PHP code to slugify strings into neat URLs.

Input: Hello Wörld! Καλημέρα. Привет, 1-й ёжик!. 富士山. 國語.

Output: hello-world-kalemera-privet-1j-ezik-fu-shi-shan-guo-yu

The construct Any-Latin; NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; NFC; [:Punctuation:] Remove; is a part of the transliterator rules for Unicode transformations, used by PHP's transliterator_transliterate function.

Code Explanation:

1. transliterator_transliterate Function:

   • This function applies Unicode transformations to a string using a set of transformation rules.
   • The rule "Any-Latin; NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; NFC; [:Punctuation:] Remove; Lower();" performs the following steps:
     • Any-Latin: Transliterates characters from any script into their Latin equivalents (e.g., Cyrillic Я → Ya).
     • NFD (Normalization Form Decomposition): Decomposes characters into their base form plus any diacritical marks (e.g., é becomes e + ´).
     • [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove: Removes diacritical marks (e.g., e + ´ becomes e).
     • NFC (Normalization Form Composition): Recombines decomposed characters into a composed form without diacritical marks.
     • [:Punctuation:] Remove: Removes punctuation characters (e.g., !, ,, etc.).
     • Lower(): Converts the resulting string to lowercase.

2. preg_replace Function:

   • preg_replace('/[-\s]+/', '-', $string) replaces one or more occurrences of spaces or hyphens with a single hyphen. This ensures a clean, consistent slug format.

3. trim Function:

   • trim($string, '-') removes any leading or trailing hyphens from the resulting string.