How does Stack Overflow generate its SEO-friendly URLs?

Question

What is a good complete regular expression or some other process that would take the title:

How do you change a title to be part of the URL like Stack

Answer 1

For good measure, here's the PHP function in WordPress that does it... I'd think that WordPress is one of the more popular platforms that uses fancy links.

    function sanitize_title_with_dashes($title) {
            $title = strip_tags($title);
            // Preserve escaped octets.
            $title = preg_replace('|%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])|', '---$1---', $title);
            // Remove percent signs that are not part of an octet.
            $title = str_replace('%', '', $title);
            // Restore octets.
            $title = preg_replace('|---([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])---|', '%$1', $title);
            $title = remove_accents($title);
            if (seems_utf8($title)) {
                    if (function_exists('mb_strtolower')) {
                            $title = mb_strtolower($title, 'UTF-8');
                    }
                    $title = utf8_uri_encode($title, 200);
            }
            $title = strtolower($title);
            $title = preg_replace('/&.+?;/', '', $title); // kill entities
            $title = preg_replace('/[^%a-z0-9 _-]/', '', $title);
            $title = preg_replace('/\s+/', '-', $title);
            $title = preg_replace('|-+|', '-', $title);
            $title = trim($title, '-');
            return $title;
    }

This function as well as some of the supporting functions can be found in wp-includes/formatting.php.