Slugify a String in Elixir

A slug, in the context of web development and content management systems, is a URL-friendly version of a string that typically represents the title or name of a resource, such as a webpage, article, or blog post. Slugs are used to create clean and readable URLs by removing special characters, spaces, and other non-alphanumeric characters from the original string. This makes the URL more search engine-friendly and easier for users to understand. For example, the original string "Engineering at Labs: Part 1" might have a slug version of engineering-at-labs-part-1 in the URL.

Elixir Slugify Function

This a small utility function that I wrote recently to auto generate slugs for dynamically generated URLs to access files stored on cloud storage.

Slugify function performs following steps:

Converts a string to downcase and remove any leading or trailing spaces
Converts graphemes into normal characters (e.g. á, é)
Replaces non-alphanumeric characters with empty string
Replaces multiple spaces or hyphens with a single hyphen

defmodule String do
    def slugify(text) when is_binary(text) do
        text
            |> String.downcase()
            |> String.trim()
            |> String.normalize(:nfd)
            |> String.replace(~r/[^a-z0-9\s-]/u, "  ")
            |> String.replace(~r/[\s-]+/, "-", global: true)
    end

    def slugify(_), do: ""
end

Playground

See the above Elixir's implementation in action in JavaScript

Title

Slug