Creating Slugs from Titles?

Question

I have everything in place to create slugs from titles, but there is one issue. My RegEx replaces spaces with hyphens. But when a user types "Hi     there" (multiple spaces) the slug ends up as "Hi-----there". When really it should be "Hi-there".

Should I create the regular expression so that it only replaces a space when there is a character either side?

Or is there an easier way to do this?

Answer 1

I use this:

yourslug.replace(/\W+/g, '-')

This replaces all occurrences of one or more non-alphanumeric characters with a single dash.

Answer 2

Just match multiple whitespace characters.

s/\s+/-/g

Answer 3

Daniel's answer is correct.

However if somebody is looking for complete solution I like this function,

http://dense13.com/blog/2009/05/03/converting-string-to-slug-javascript/

Thanks to "dense13"!

Answer 4

It might be the easiest to fold repeated -s into one - as the last step:

replace /-{2,}/ by "-"

Or if you only want this to affect spaces, fold spaces instead (before the other steps, obviously)

Answer 5

I would replace [\s]+ with '-' and then replace [^\w-] with ''

Answer 6

You may want to trim the string first, to avoid leading and trailing hyphens.

function hyphenSpace(s){
    s= (s.trim)? s.trim(): s.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g,'');
    return s.split(/\s+/).join('-');
}