How to Strip Non-Alphanumeric Characters and Replace Spaces with Hyphens in URLs?

Stripping Out Non-Alphanumeric Characters and Replacing Spaces with Hyphens

When constructing URLs, it's necessary to convert titles containing various characters into clean strings consisting solely of letters and numbers. This involves removing special characters and replacing spaces with hyphens.

Implementation Using Regular Expressions

Regular expressions (regex) offer an effective solution for this task. Here's how to achieve the desired result:

Step 1: Replace Spaces with Hyphens

$string = str_replace(' ', '-', $string);

Step 2: Remove Non-Alphanumeric Characters

$string = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9\-]/', '', $string);

This regex expression removes any characters that are not letters, numbers, or hyphens.

Usage:

echo clean('a|"bc!@£de^&$f g');

Output:

abcdef-g

Preventing Multiple Consecutive Hyphens

To ensure that multiple consecutive hyphens are replaced with a single hyphen, use the following additional step:

$string = preg_replace('/-+/', '-', $string);

This step replaces all occurrences of two or more consecutive hyphens with a single hyphen.

The above is the detailed content of How to Strip Non-Alphanumeric Characters and Replace Spaces with Hyphens in URLs?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!