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 Overflow?

and turn it into

how-do-you-change-a-title-to-be-part-of-the-url-like-stack-overflow

that is used in the SEO-friendly URLs on Stack Overflow?

The development environment I am using is Ruby on Rails, but if there are some other platform-specific solutions (.NET, PHP, Django), I would love to see those too.

I am sure I (or another reader) will come across the same problem on a different platform down the line.

I am using custom routes, and I mainly want to know how to alter the string to all special characters are removed, it's all lowercase, and all whitespace is replaced.

Answer 1

/// <summary>
/// Produces optional, URL-friendly version of a title, "like-this-one". 
/// hand-tuned for speed, reflects performance refactoring contributed
/// by John Gietzen (user otac0n) 
/// </summary>
public static string URLFriendly(string title)
{
    if (title == null) return "";

    const int maxlen = 80;
    int len = title.Length;
    bool prevdash = false;
    var sb = new StringBuilder(len);
    char c;

    for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
    {
        c = title[i];
        if ((c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') || (c >= '0' && c <= '9'))
        {
            sb.Append(c);
            prevdash = false;
        }
        else if (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z')
        {
            // tricky way to convert to lowercase
            sb.Append((char)(c | 32));
            prevdash = false;
        }
        else if (c == ' ' || c == ',' || c == '.' || c == '/' || 
            c == '\\' || c == '-' || c == '_' || c == '=')
        {
            if (!prevdash && sb.Length > 0)
            {
                sb.Append('-');
                prevdash = true;
            }
        }
        else if ((int)c >= 128)
        {
            int prevlen = sb.Length;
            sb.Append(RemapInternationalCharToAscii(c));
            if (prevlen != sb.Length) prevdash = false;
        }
        if (i == maxlen) break;
    }

    if (prevdash)
        return sb.ToString().Substring(0, sb.Length - 1);
    else
        return sb.ToString();
}

this is the second version of the code and have worked so far and it has 5x more performance boosted