How to remove whitespace + hiphen + whitespace to only hiphen in url slug with preg_replace

Question

I am using this function. Everything works fine but When i enter item title like : "Example - A digital product" it shows me in url slug example---a-digital-product..Here after word example there are 3 hiphen continuous. Please help to resolve it.

public function item_slug($string){
        $slug=preg_replace(array('/[^A-Za-z0-9 -]+/','/[ -]+/'), array('',''),$string);
       return $slug;
}

Answer 1

You could use a hyphen in the second replacement to replace 1 or more occurrences of a space or hyphen you match with [ -]+ with a single hyphen.

Example code:

function item_slug($string){
    return preg_replace(array('/[^A-Za-z0-9 -]+/','/[ -]+/'), array('','-'),$string);
}

$strings = [
    "example---a-digital-product..",
    "Example - A digital product"
];

foreach ($strings as $str) {
    echo item_slug($str) . PHP_EOL;
}

Output

example-a-digital-product
Example-A-digital-product

Php demo