Dmitry Yakovlev dimayakovlev

Creating URL slugs properly in PHP (including transliteration for UTF-8)

The point to use a slug (semantic URL) besides of improve the SEO of your articles is to prevent that the user, at the creation of for example an article, it uses special characters that aren't allowed in a URL, appropiate the usage etc. What target usage means, is context dependent.

In this article, you'll learn how to slugify a string in PHP properly, including (or not) support (conversion) for cyrilic and special latin characters.

Slugify in PHP

The following function exposes a simple way to convert text into a valid slug:

	<?php
	/**
	* Get browser language, given an array of avalaible languages.
	*
	* @param [array] $availableLanguages Avalaible languages for the site
	* @param [string] $default Default language for the site
	* @return [string] Language code/prefix
	*/
	function get_browser_language( $available = [], $default = 'en' ) {
	if ( isset( $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE' ] ) ) {