How to replace one or more consecutive spaces with one single character?

Question

I want to generate the string like SEO friendly URL. I want that multiple blank space to be eliminated, the single space to be replaced by a hyphen (-), then strtolower and no special chars should be allowed.

For that I am currently the code like this:

$string = htmlspecialchars("This    Is The String");
$string = strtolower(str_replace(htmlspecialchars((' ', '-', $string)));

The above code will generate multiple hyphens. I want to eliminate that multiple space and replace it with only one space. In short, I am trying to achieve the SEO friendly URL like string. How do I do it?

Answer 1

You can use preg_replace to replace any sequence of whitespace chars with a dash...

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

• The outer slashes are delimiters for the pattern - they just mark where the pattern starts and ends
• \s matches any whitespace character
• + causes the previous element to match 1 or more times. By default, this is 'greedy' so it will eat up as many consecutive matches as it can.
• See the manual page on PCRE syntax for more details

Answer 2

echo preg_replace('~(\s+)~', '-', $yourString);

Answer 3

What you want is "slugify" a string. Try a search on SO or google on "php slugify" or "php slug".