Remove international characters from slug - Almost done - Bit help

Question

I want to remove some characters from the slug, like "¿" that we use in spanish for opening a question.

If I go to wp-includes/formatting.php and in

function sanitize_title_with_dashes($title)

line 820 wp32 I add this

$title = str_replace('¿', '', $title);

just before $title = preg_replace('|%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])|', '---$1---', $title);

And it is working correctly. So when I write in the title "¿Qué tal?" the slug is "que-tal"

Now, how to do it with a function so I can use it via functions.php or via a plugin??

I am doing this but it is not working

function limpiar_slug($slug)
{
    $slug = str_replace('¿', '', $slug);
    return $slug;
}

add_filter('sanitize_title_with_dashes', 'limpiar_slug');

Any suggestion???

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Following on from my comment on your question.

The solution would be to hook your own filter onto the same functions sanitize_title_with_dashes does, in this case i think you're just aiming to hook onto sanitize_title as is done with sanitize_title_with_dashes.

Simply ensure you hook on after sanitize_title_with_dashes, which is hooked on at the default priority of 10.

Eg.

add_filter('sanitize_title', 'limpiar_slug', 11 );

No need to hack core files.

EDIT BELOW:

You could give some regex a try, here's a sample you can play with, code adapted from Adriana Villafañe's code in response to Regular expression - any text to URL friendly one on StackOverflow.

add_filter( 'sanitize_title', 'sanitize_title_extra' );

function sanitize_title_extra( $title ) {

    $friendlyURL = htmlentities($title, ENT_COMPAT, "UTF-8", false); 
    $friendlyURL = preg_replace('/&([a-z]{1,2})(?:acute|lig|grave|ring|tilde|uml|cedil|caron);/i','\1',$friendlyURL);
    $friendlyURL = html_entity_decode($friendlyURL,ENT_COMPAT, "UTF-8"); 
    $friendlyURL = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9-]+/i', '-', $friendlyURL);
    $friendlyURL = preg_replace('/-+/', '-', $friendlyURL);
    $friendlyURL = trim($friendlyURL, '-');
    $friendlyURL = strtolower($friendlyURL);
    return $friendlyURL;

}

Seems to do the trick of clearing up some unwanted characters, feel free to tweak, etc...

Answer 2

The problem is that the function sanitize_title_with_dashes doesn't use filters (which is odd I think) so you won't be able to change it without hacking the formatting.php file directly :(