PHP creating slugify (clean URL) links in simple way?

Question

I think this is the simplest way to slugify urls. You have any contra-indication?

function url_clean($str){
 $str = iconv('utf-8', 'us-ascii//TRANSLIT', $str);
 $clean_str = preg_replace(array('/\'|\"/','/ /'),array('','-'),$str);
 return $clean_str;
}

Answer 1

An alternative, simpler way to code your solution is to use the strtr function which "translates characters". Also I made sure to escape the special characters in the regex.

function url_clean($str) {
 $accent = array(' űáéúőóüöíŰÁÉÚŐÓÜÖÍ');
 $clean = array('-uaeuoouoiUAEUOOUOI');
 $str = strtr($str, $accent, $clean);
 return preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9\-\.]/', '', $str);
}

Answer 2

There are two issues with your otherwise elegant approach:

1. iconv silently cuts the string if a disallowed UTF-8 character is present. The solution would be to add //IGNORE to the iconv() call but 1/ a bug in glibc seems to prevent this 2/ PHP developers don't seem to want to implement a work-around. An option is to remove invalid characters yourself:

   ini_set('mbstring.substitute_character', "none"); 
   $text= mb_convert_encoding($text, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8'); 
   

2. You're not removing all characters that are present in ASCII but disallowed in a URL: see this StackOverflow answer.