Stripping parentheses (and contents) out of URL's

[Chavista]

I have a database filled with scientific names that I use as URL’s. They look like this:

Canis lupus
Panthera leo

I can easily use str_replace to replace the space with a hyphen:

Canis-lupus
Panthera-leo

But some URL’s look like this:

Panthera (Felis) sibirica

What’s the best way to strip out the parentheses and their contents and the spaces, replacing them with a hyphen?..

Panthera-sibirica

I’m doing a simple query and displaying URL’s as $URL.

Someone told me to use urlencode, but I don’t understand how it works. Thanks.

[felgall]

@Chavista

but I don’t understand how it works

using urlencode means that you don’t strip out or change any of the characters - you just encode the ones that are not allowed in a url so they are replaced by character combinations that are allowed and which can convert back to the original values when the url is decoded.

[megazoid]

Here is my function for converting strings to SLUGs:

function slug($string){    
    $string = strip_tags(trim($string));
    $string = mb_strtolower($string, 'utf-8');
    $slug = preg_replace ('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\-\/]/u', '-', $string);
    $slug = preg_replace('/([-]+)/i', '-', $slug);
    $slug = trim($slug, '-');
    if (!$slug){ $slug = 'untitled'; }
    return $slug;    
}

Usage:

$slug = slug('Panthera (Felis) sibirica'); //=> panthera-felis-sibirica

[Chavista]

Sorry, I guess I didn’t explain clearly. In this case, I don’t want to display panthera-felis-sibirica; I want to strip out the parentheses AND THEIR CONTENTS, so it displays panthera-sibirica. Thanks.

[Chavista]

Hmmm…maybe I should look into that. I have lots of URL’s that include apostrophes or accents. So I have type in the code…

’

But I don’t want the code in my URL’s (field Slug), so I have two separate values in my database table:

Richardson’s squirrel
richardsons-squirrel