I'm autogenerating URLs for my image stream (github repository). I want googleable "sane" URLs for each image. This means that I want to turn, for example, the image img_1648 with the resolution 0640 in the folder 20120419-luminale and no tags into the string img_1648_0640_20120419-luminale.jpeg. But it also means that I want to turn "arbitrary" words in tags into their romanized form, turn whitespace into underscores etc, like the following :

In addition, the empty string remains the empty string, and newlines and tabs also get converted to underscores. The routine is only intended for URL fragments, not complete URLs or path parts. /foo/bar/index.html will get turned into foo_bar_index.html.

I'm not so sure about the "ss" part, but that's what Text::Unidecode gives me, and for the moment I'm OK with that.

The ridiculously simple code that does these replacements (assuming Unicode input) is:

sub sanitize_name {
    # make uri-sane filenames
    # We assume Unicode on input.

    # XXX Maybe use whatever SocialText used to create titles
    
    # First, downgrade to ASCII chars (or transliterate if possible)
    @_ = unidecode(@_);

    for( @_ ) {
        s/['"]//gi;
        s/[^a-zA-Z0-9.-]/ /gi;
        s/\s+/_/g;
        s/_-_/-/g;
        s/^_+//g;
        s/_+$//g;
    };
    wantarray ? @_ : $_[0];
};

[download]

The test cases I currently have document my expectations best:

#!perl -w
use strict;
use Test::More;
use Data::Dumper;

use App::ImageStream::Image;
use utf8;

binmode DATA, ':utf8';
my @tests = map { s!\s+$!!g; [split /\|/] } grep {!/^\s*#/} <DATA>;

push @tests, ["String\nWith\n\nNewlines\r\nEmbedded","String_With_Newl
+ines_Embedded"];
push @tests, ["String\tWith \t Tabs \tEmbedded","String_With_Tabs_Embe
+dded"];
push @tests, ["","",'Empty String'];

plan tests => 1+@tests*2;

for (@tests) {
    my $name= $_->[2] || $_->[1];
    is App::ImageStream::Image::sanitize_name($_->[0]), $_->[1], $name
+;
    is App::ImageStream::Image::sanitize_name($_->[1]), $_->[1], "'$na
+me' is idempotent";
};

is_deeply [App::ImageStream::Image::sanitize_name(
    'Lenny', 'Motörhead'
)], ['Lenny','Motorhead'], "Multiple arguments also work";

__DATA__
Grégory|Gregory
   Leading Spaces|Leading_Spaces
   Trailing Space|Trailing_Space
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason|AEvar_Arnfjord_Bjarmason
forward/slash|forward_slash
Ümloud feat. ß|Umloud_feat._ss
/foo/bar/index.html|foo_bar_index.html|filename with path

[download]

The thing that keeps nagging me is that all those blog engines have been doing this kind of thing for a long time already, as have Stackoverflow etc. - but I can't find a Perl module on CPAN that implements this. This is a call for critique - likely I have overlooked some edge cases that result in "ugly" URL fragments created. But this is also a call to whether such a module already exists, or whether I should just release this snippet as a module for general consumption.

In reply to A module for creating "sane" URLs from "arbitrary" titles? by Corion

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