PHP Remove url-"not allowed" characters from string

Question

I have read through all the questions regarding this, and would like to know if $str = preg_replace('/[^\00-\255]+/u', '', $str); is sufficient for my scenario.

My Scenario

When a user creates an account on my site, he enters his company's name. This can be anything including text with ' or " or even some other strange characters. When he creates an account, I need to create a folder on my server for him to access his account easier without using uniqids etc.

So for example you create an account for "Peter's Pet Shop & Washing" - I would need to remove all spaces and characters that would not be allowed as a url-address. So at the end I need to have "peterspetshopwashing"

This is so that you can access your account at "www.mydomain.com/peterspetshopwashing"

Be careful though because "Peter's Pets Hop @ Washing" would also translate to the same string. — kapa
– kapa, Commented Sep 27, 2011 at 11:35
Yep, noticed that. Will be checking that the input must be unique — Pangolin
– Pangolin, Commented Sep 27, 2011 at 11:43

genesis · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-27 11:20:16Z

12

I currently use this function I'm happy with

function url($url) {
   $url = preg_replace('~[^\\pL0-9_]+~u', '-', $url);
   $url = trim($url, "-");
   $url = iconv("utf-8", "us-ascii//TRANSLIT", $url);
   $url = strtolower($url);
   $url = preg_replace('~[^-a-z0-9_]+~', '', $url);
   return $url;
}

it replaces spaces and other odd characters with - so result will be peter-s-pet-shop-washing

answered Sep 27, 2011 at 11:20

genesis

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1 Comment

Pangolin Over a year ago

Sweet, I tuned it a bit, making ' go away instead of - Thank you.

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