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Is there a page somewhere that details exactly how WordPress generates slugs for URLs? I'm writing a script that needs to generate URL slugs identical to the ones WordPress generates.

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2 Answers

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Off the bat, I can't give you a page/tutorial/documentation on how WP slugs are generated, but take a look at the sanitize_title() function.

Don't get a wrong impression by the function name, it is not meant to sanitize a title for further usage as a page/post title. It takes a title string and returns it to be used in a URL:

  • strips HTML & PHP
  • strips special chars
  • converts all characters to lowercaps
  • replaces whitespaces, underscores and periods by hyphens/dashes
  • reduces multiple consecutive dashes to one

There might be edge cases where the core does something additional (you'd have to look at the source to verify that sanitize_title() will always suffice in generating exactly the same you expect), but this should cover at least 99%, if not all, cases.

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+1 Seems like I misunderstood the question slightly. – kaiser Nov 30 '12 at 17:05
1  
@kaiser: I figured you're simply in love with T5 Rewrite :) (which is on my agenda to check out) | and generally: If a title is really long, WP also trims slugs to a certain maximum length. That's one of those cases where I am not entirely sure whether that's done by the sanitize_title filter applied in the function as well, or whether that's handled by something else after the function has run. – Johannes Pille Nov 30 '12 at 18:24
I guess it's the sanitize_title-filter that one needs to check out. But there're also other related functions. I really got no idea about this. Sometimes it seems SimplePie is easier to understand than the WP_Rewrite thing. Btw: Toscho works on integrating the "Monkeyman Rewrite Analyzer"-functionality into his plugin. That's where things start to really get interesting. – kaiser Nov 30 '12 at 18:52
up vote 2 down vote

Core at your service

There's no developer mode built into WordPress aside from WP_DEBUG, which doesn't help you too much in this case. Basically WP uses the "Rewrite API", which is a function based, low level wrapper for the WP_Rewrite class, which you can read about in Codex. The global $wp_rewrite object stands at your service to inspect it or interact with the class.

Plugins that help looking into it.

Toschos "T5 Rewrite"-Plugin and Jan Fabrys "Monkeyman Rewrite Analyzer"-Plugin will guide you your way. I've written a small extension for "T5 Rewrite" to smoothly integrate it with the "Monkeyman Rewrite Analyzer", which you can find in the "T5 Rewrite" repos wikie here on GitHub.

The "Monkeyman"-plugin adds a new page, filed in the admin UI menu under Tools. The "T5 Rewrite"-plugin adds a new help tab to the Settings > Permalinks page. My extension adds the help tabs to the mentioned Tools-page too.

Here's a screenshot of what the "T5 Rewrite"-plugins help tab content looks like.

enter image description here

Vorlage = Pattern | Beschreibung = Explanation | Beispiele = Examples

Notes

The "T5 Rewrite"-plugin does a wonderful job with helping you inspect the rewrite object. And it does even more: It adds new possibilities. Therefore it's (at least in my installations) part of my basic plugins package.

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