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

I am not familiar with Ruby on Rails, but the following is (untested) PHP code. You can probably translate this very quickly to Ruby on Rails if you find it useful.

$sURL = "This is a title to convert to URL-format. It has 1 number in it!";
// To lower-case
$sURL = strtolower($sURL);

// Replace all non-word characters with spaces
$sURL = preg_replace("/\W+/", " ", $sURL);

// Remove trailing spaces (so we won't end with a separator)
$sURL = trim($sURL);

// Replace spaces with separators (hyphens)
$sURL = str_replace(" ", "-", $sURL);

echo $sURL;
// outputs: this-is-a-title-to-convert-to-url-format-it-has-1-number-in-it

I hope this helps.