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

T-SQL implementation, adapted from dbo.UrlEncode:

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.Slug(@string varchar(1024))
RETURNS varchar(3072)
AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @count int, @c char(1), @i int, @slug varchar(3072)

    SET @string = replace(lower(ltrim(rtrim(@string))),' ','-')

    SET @count = Len(@string)
    SET @i = 1
    SET @slug = ''

    WHILE (@i <= @count)
    BEGIN
        SET @c = substring(@string, @i, 1)

        IF @c LIKE '[a-z0-9--]'
            SET @slug = @slug + @c

        SET @i = @i +1
    END

    RETURN @slug
END