Best way to generate slugs (human-readable IDs) in Rails

You know, like myblog.com/posts/donald-e-knuth.

Should I do this with the built in parameterize method?

What about a plugin? I could imagine a plugin being nice for handling duplicate slugs, etc. Here are some popular Github plugins -- does anyone have any experience with them?

1. http://github.com/rsl/stringex/tree/master
2. http://github.com/norman/friendly_id/tree/master

Basically it seems like slugs are a totally solved problem, and I don't to reinvent the wheel.

Solution 1:

In Rails you can use #parameterize

For example:

> "Foo bar`s".parameterize 
=> "foo-bar-s"

Solution 2:

The best way to generate slugs is to use the Unidecode gem. It has by far the largest transliteration database available. It has even transliterations for Chinese characters. Not to mention covering all European languages (including local dialects). It guarantees a bulletproof slug creation.

For example, consider those:

"Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn".to_slug
=> "internationalizaetion"

>> "中文測試".to_slug
=> "zhong-wen-ce-shi"

I use it in my version of the String.to_slug method in my ruby_extensions plugin. See ruby_extensions.rb for the to_slug method.

Solution 3:

I use the following, which will

• translate & --> "and" and @ --> "at"
• doesn't insert an underscore in place of an apostrophe, so "foo's" --> "foos"
• doesn't include double-underscores
• doesn't create slug that begins or ends with an underscore

  def to_slug
    #strip the string
    ret = self.strip

    #blow away apostrophes
    ret.gsub! /['`]/,""

    # @ --> at, and & --> and
    ret.gsub! /\s*@\s*/, " at "
    ret.gsub! /\s*&\s*/, " and "

    #replace all non alphanumeric, underscore or periods with underscore
     ret.gsub! /\s*[^A-Za-z0-9\.\-]\s*/, '_'  

     #convert double underscores to single
     ret.gsub! /_+/,"_"

     #strip off leading/trailing underscore
     ret.gsub! /\A[_\.]+|[_\.]+\z/,""

     ret
  end

so, for example:

>> s = "mom & dad @home!"
=> "mom & dad @home!"
>> s.to_slug
> "mom_and_dad_at_home"

Solution 4:

Here is what I use:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_create :make_slug
  private

  def make_slug
    self.slug = self.name.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')
  end
end

Pretty self explanatory, although the only problem with this is if there is already the same one, it won't be name-01 or something like that.

Example:

".downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')".downcase.gsub(/[^a-z1-9]+/, '-').chomp('-')

Outputs: -downcase-gsub-a-z1-9-chomp

Solution 5:

I modified it a bit to create dashes instead of underscores, if anyone is interested:

def to_slug(param=self.slug)

    # strip the string
    ret = param.strip

    #blow away apostrophes
    ret.gsub! /['`]/, ""

    # @ --> at, and & --> and
    ret.gsub! /\s*@\s*/, " at "
    ret.gsub! /\s*&\s*/, " and "

    # replace all non alphanumeric, periods with dash
    ret.gsub! /\s*[^A-Za-z0-9\.]\s*/, '-'

    # replace underscore with dash
    ret.gsub! /[-_]{2,}/, '-'

    # convert double dashes to single
    ret.gsub! /-+/, "-"

    # strip off leading/trailing dash
    ret.gsub! /\A[-\.]+|[-\.]+\z/, ""

    ret
  end