ter Smitten's

For a project I was working on I was in desperate need for a tool to generate slugs. Of course there are like million functions that can do that. We have the Mootools function String.Slugify, we have cakePHP’s function Inflector::slug et cetera. But there are no commandline or online tools that use these functions. So I created them! The commandline version is write in PHP and looks like this:

< ?php
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'en_US.UTF8');

if ($argc < 2)
{
  echo $argv&#91;0&#93;." <to slug text>\n";
  exit(1);
}

$words = $argv;
array_shift($words);

echo "\n";
echo toAscii(implode(' ', $words));
echo "\n\n";

function toAscii($str, $replace = array(), $delimiter = '-')
{
  if( !empty($replace) )
  {
    $str = str_replace((array)$replace, ' ', $str);
  }

  $clean = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $str);
  $clean = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\/_|+ -]/", '', $clean);
  $clean = strtolower(trim($clean, '-'));
  $clean = preg_replace("/[\/_|+ -]+/", $delimiter, $clean);

  return $clean;
}
?>

And this is how you use it:

php slugify.php A string to slugify

# ouput
a-string-to-slugify

non PHP version, but this way I could also use it online. And that’s what I did. Slugify, my online slug generator uses the same function.

References:

• The perfect PHP clean url generator

While R can be used in batch mode:

R --no-save --no-restore --quiet < myRprog.r > myRprog.log 2>&1

Much more fancy things can be done by means of littler. Littler (pronounced ‘little R’ and written ‘r’) provides hash-bang (i.e. script starting with #!/foo/bar) capability for GNU R, as well as simple command-line and piping use. For all the example take a look at http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/littler.html.

This is how I use it mostly:

# cat test.R | r
[1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

or

# echo "print(1:10)" | r
[1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10