php 39 lines · 8 steps

Building a URL slug from any title in PHP

A step-by-step regex pipeline turns arbitrary, accented text into a clean, lowercase URL slug.

Explained by highlit

Intermediate regex transliteration string-processing unicode url-slugs

1<?php
2 
3namespace App\Support;
4 
5final class Slugifier
6{
7    public function make(string $title, string $separator = '-'): string
8    {
9        $title = $this->transliterate($title);
10        $title = mb_strtolower($title, 'UTF-8');
11 
12        $flip = $separator === '-' ? '_' : '-';
13        $title = preg_replace('![' . preg_quote($flip, '!') . ']+!u', $separator, $title);
14 
15        $title = str_replace('@', $separator . 'at' . $separator, $title);
16 
17        $title = preg_replace('![^' . preg_quote($separator, '!') . '\pL\pN\s]+!u', '', $title);
18 
19        $title = preg_replace('![' . preg_quote($separator, '!') . '\s]+!u', $separator, $title);
20 
21        return trim($title, $separator);
22    }
23 
24    private function transliterate(string $value): string
25    {
26        if (function_exists('transliterator_transliterate')) {
27            $transliterated = transliterator_transliterate(
28                'Any-Latin; Latin-ASCII; [\u0080-\u7fff] remove',
29                $value
30            );
31 
32            if ($transliterated !== false) {
33                return $transliterated;
34            }
35        }
36 
37        return iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', $value) ?: $value;
38    }
39}

01 / 01

STEP 01

Walkthrough

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Three takeaways

1Normalizing accents to ASCII before slugifying keeps URLs stable across languages.
2Layering small regex passes — flip, strip, collapse, trim — is clearer than one monster pattern.
3Preferring the intl extension with an iconv fallback makes transliteration robust across environments.

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