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

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.

Recently I had the same dilemma.

Since, like you, I don't want to reinvent the wheel, I chose friendly_id following the comparison on The Ruby Toolbox: Rails Permalinks & Slugs.

I based my decision on:

• number of github watchers
• no. of github forks
• when was the last commit made
• no. of downloads

Hope this helps in taking the decision.

I found the Unidecode gem to be much too heavyweight, loading nearly 200 YAML files, for what I needed. I knew iconv had some support for the basic translations, and while it isn't perfect, it's built in and fairly lightweight. This is what I came up with:

require 'iconv' # unless you're in Rails or already have it loaded
def slugify(text)
  text.downcase!
  text = Iconv.conv('ASCII//TRANSLIT//IGNORE', 'UTF8', text)

  # Replace whitespace characters with hyphens, avoiding duplication
  text.gsub! /\s+/, '-'

  # Remove anything that isn't alphanumeric or a hyphen
  text.gsub! /[^a-z0-9-]+/, ''

  # Chomp trailing hyphens
  text.chomp '-'
end

Obviously you should probably add it as an instance method on any objects you'll be running it on, but for clarity, I didn't.