Convert a string (e.g., News & Events) to a usable CSS selector (e.g., id="news-events", class="news-events").

gistfile1.txt

<?php

/**
 * Convert a string (e.g., News &amp; Events) into a usable
 * CSS selector (e.g., id="news-events", class="news-events").
 *
 * @param $text
 * @return $text
 */
function check_selector($text) {

  // Step 1: remove all uppercase
  $text = strtolower($text);
  
  // Step 2: make sure we are not dealing with encoded HTML Special Characters, if so we cannot remove them properly in the next command
  $text = htmlspecialchars_decode($text);

  // Step 3: replace all non-alphanumeric characters with spaces
  $text = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", ' ', $text);

  // Step 4: remove all HTML characters
  $text = htmlspecialchars($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
  
  // Step 5: replace all spaces with hyphens
  $text = str_replace(' ' , '-', $text);
  
  // Step 6: replace multiple-sequential hypens with a single hypen
  $text = preg_replace('{\-+}', '-', $text);
  
  // Step 7: return cleaned up text as selector
  return $text;
}