Remove all problematic characters in an intelligent way in C#

Question

Is there any .Net library to remove all problematic characters of a string and only leave alphanumeric, hyphen and underscore (or similar subset) in an intelligent way? This is for using in URLs, file names, etc.

I'm looking for something similar to stringex which can do the following:

A simple prelude

"simple English".to_url => "simple-english"

"it's nothing at all".to_url => "its-nothing-at-all"

"rock & roll".to_url => "rock-and-roll"

Let's show off

"$12 worth of Ruby power".to_url => "12-dollars-worth-of-ruby-power"

"10% off if you act now".to_url => "10-percent-off-if-you-act-now"

You don't even wanna trust Iconv for this next part

"kick it en Français".to_url => "kick-it-en-francais"

"rock it Español style".to_url => "rock-it-espanol-style"

"tell your readers 你好".to_url => "tell-your-readers-ni-hao"

Answer 1

You can try this

string str = phrase.ToLower();  //optional
str = str.Trim();
str = Regex.Replace(str, @"[^a-z0-9\s_]", ""); // invalid chars        
str = Regex.Replace(str, @"\s+", " ").Trim(); // convert multiple spaces into one space
str = str.Substring(0, str.Length <= 400 ? str.Length : 400).Trim(); // cut and trim it
str = Regex.Replace(str, @"\s", "-");

Answer 2

Perhaps this question here can help you on your way. It gives you code on how Stackoverflow generates its url's (more specifically, how question names are turned into nice urls.

Link to Question here, where Jeff Atwood shows their code