Words To A Slug

Sometimes you want a slug to make a filename. A slug is a group of words where the punctuation is removed and spaces are replaced with hyphens.

Here is a simple way to implement this in Java. (It’s met my needs so far.)

/**
 * Returns a phrase into a slug ie: This Is Good (this-is-good.md)
 * @param input The text to transform into a slug
 * @return The slug of the text passed in
 */
public static String toSlug(String input) {
    return input
            .toLowerCase()
            .replaceAll("[^a-z0-9\\s]", "")   // remove punctuation
            .trim()
            .replaceAll("\\s+", "-")         // spaces → hyphens
            + ".md";
}

It can use some work. I have noticed if you have a hyphen in the word you pass in, it will put – which you might not want. So yeah some tweaks can be added to it for sure.