Possible Duplicate:
How to handle diacritics (accents) when rewriting 'pretty URLs'
I want to replace special characters, such as Å Ä Ö Ü é, with "normal" characters (those between a-z and 0-9). And spaces should certainly be replaced with dashes, but that's not really a problem.
In other words, I want to turn this:
en räksmörgås
into this:
en-raksmorgas
What's the best way to do this?
Thank you in advance.
You can use iconv for the string replacement...
$string = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', $string);
Basically, it'll transliterate the characters it can, and drop those it can't (that are not in the ASCII character set)...
Then, just replace the spaces with str_replace:
$string = str_replace(' ', '-', $string);
Or, if you want to get fancy, you can replace all consecutive white-space characters with a single dash using a simple regex:
$string = preg_replace('/\\s+/', '-', $string);
Edit As @Robert Ros points out, you need to set the locale prior to using iconv (Depending on the defaults of your system). Just execute this line prior to the iconv line:
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, 'en_US.UTF8');
Check out http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtr.php
<?php
$addr = strtr($addr, "äåö", "aao");
?>
A clever hack often used for this is calling htmlentitites, then running
preg_replace('/&(\w)(acute|uml|circ|tilde|ring|grave);/', '\1', $str);
to get rid of the diacritics. A more complete (but often unnecessarily complicated) solution is using a Unicode decomposition algorithm to split diacritics, then dropping everything that is not an ASCII letter or digit.
