Format String for SEO friendly

Question

I have a string like

Deser't  - & Fest !

how to format this string is seo friendly like Desert-Fest.

In php I use the above function

function cleanString($str, $separator = "-"){
    $q_separator = preg_quote($separator);

    $trans = array(
        '&.+?;'                 => '',
        '[^a-z0-9 _-]'          => '',
        '\s+'                   => $separator,
        '('.$q_separator.')+'   => $separator
    );

    $str = strip_tags($str);

    foreach ($trans as $key => $val){
        $str = preg_replace("#".$key."#i", $val, $str);
    }

    $str = strtolower($str);

    return trim($str, $separator);
}

How to do this in Jquery?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Half of your solution is to HTML-decode the entities in the input. That can be done in JS like this, or jQuery like this.

From there you can use a regular expression to remove any characters from the resulting string that you don't want, like this:

function htmlDecode(input) {
  var e = document.createElement('textarea');
  e.innerHTML = input;
  return e.childNodes.length === 0 ? "" : e.childNodes[0].nodeValue;
}

let input = "Deser't  - & Fest !";
let output = htmlDecode(input);
output = output.replace(/[^a-z-]/gi, ''); // remove anything that isn't a-Z or -
console.log(output);