Yeoman Prompt: How Generate A Valid Filename From A String?

Is there a method implemented in Yeoman or in Node to generate a valid filename from a string? My aim is to replace accented letters by normal letters, spaces by dashes, etc.

Solution 1:

Basically, all you need is a function that removes special characters and perhaps replaces them using an arbitrary system.

One option was already named by passy, which is to make use of:

this._.dasherize(str)

Nevertheless, there are some additional options you might use. E.g., you might check out the underscore.string module, which provides some functions for this. From these, I'd highly recommend the slugify function:

From the documentation:

Transform text into a URL slug. Replaces whitespaces, accentuated, and special characters with a dash.

To provide an example:

_.slugify("Un éléphant à l'orée du bois")
=> 'un-elephant-a-loree-du-bois';

This should be exactly what you need, and still keeps a good readability.

Hope this helps.

Solution 2:

For Yeoman generators, the common way to handle this is to use this._.dasherize(str) in the JavaScript generator code or <%= _.dasherize(str) %> in templates. It doesn't take care of accented letters, but those should be valid filenames anyway.

console.log(this._.dasherize("some userProvided string")); 
// output: "some-user-provided-string"