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

You can use the following helper method. It can convert the Unicode characters.

public static string ConvertTextToSlug(string s)
{
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    bool wasHyphen = true;

    foreach (char c in s)
    {
        if (char.IsLetterOrDigit(c))
        {
            sb.Append(char.ToLower(c));
            wasHyphen = false;
        }
        else
            if (char.IsWhiteSpace(c) && !wasHyphen)
            {
                sb.Append('-');
                wasHyphen = true;
            }
    }

    // Avoid trailing hyphens
    if (wasHyphen && sb.Length > 0)
        sb.Length--;

    return sb.ToString().Replace("--","-");
}