Neat way to Strip URL?

[PowerStrike]

I am going to include title in the URL for SEO.

However it need to strip illegal character such as ' : ] " / \ * and so on...

What is the best way doing this?

$a = "Hello? What's is your name?"

should return: "hello-whats-is-your-name"

This is what I have done, is any better way?

function StandardizeString($PassedStr)
 {
 $PassedStr = preg_replace('/[\'!?"]/','', $PassedStr); // Eliminate all quotes
 $PassedStr = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+/', '-', $PassedStr); // Remove all spaces
 $PassedStr = strtolower($PassedStr); // Lowercase everything
 return $PassedStr;
 }
 
$a = "Hello, What's your name!???$%^&*()";
 
echo StandardizeString($a);

Output: hello-whats-your-name-

[Salathe]

It might also be useful to have a quick trim($str, '-') to snip off leading/trailing dashes.

[Andy Robinson]

I use this function to create 'tokens' of strings...

function str2token($string) {
$r = ereg_replace('[^[:alnum:]-]','-',strtolower($string));
$r = preg_replace('/-+/','-',trim($r,'-'));
return $r;
}

[wibble wobble]

Here's mine:

/**
 * Create URL Title
 *
 * Takes a "title" string as input and creates a
 * human-friendly URL string with either a dash
 * or an underscore as the word separator.
 *
 * @access  public
 * @param  string  the title
 * @param  string  the separator
 * @return  string
 */
function url_title($str, $separator = '-')
{
  $trans = array(
            '\s+'                     => $separator,
            '[^a-z0-9'.$separator.']'  => '',
            $separator.'+'            => $separator,
            $separator.'$'            => '',
            '^'.$separator            => ''
  );

  $str = strtolower($str);

  foreach ($trans as $search => $replace)
  {
    $str = preg_replace('#'.$search.'#', $replace, $str);
  }

  return $str;
}