Download the PHP package hatchyu/string-utils without Composer

Hatchyu String Utils

A powerful PHP string manipulation library for smarter slugging, casing, and monotonic unique hash generation.

The main goal of this package is to improve code-like and identifier-like strings that Laravel's default Str::slug() tends to flatten too aggressively. It handles camelCase, StudlyCase, acronym boundaries, number-to-word transitions, Unicode transliteration, and optional compound-word protection.

Features

• Smart Slugging: Intelligent splitting of acronyms, camelCase, and numeric boundaries.
• Compound Words Support: Protect specific brand names (e.g., "MySQL", "iPhone") from being split.
• Multilingual Support: Robust transliteration for Greek, Malayalam, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and more.
• SEO Optimized: Handles symbols like @ as -at- and respects word boundaries when limiting length.
• Unique Hash Generation: Monotonic time-based unique hashes with custom lengths.

Installation

Requirements

• PHP ^8.3
• ext-intl is optional, but recommended if you want transliteration such as ÜberCafe -> uber-cafe or non-Latin text converted into Latin slugs

Without ext-intl, the slug helpers still work, but transliteration depends only on the raw input that PHP receives.

Usage

StrTo Helpers

Slugging helpers

• slug(string $string, int $maxLength = 120, string $lang = 'en'): string Produces a URL-friendly slug. Keeps @ as -at-, transliterates to ASCII for English when ext-intl is installed, preserves word boundaries better than a plain flatten-and-replace approach, and trims to the first wrapped segment.
• snake(string $string): string Same smart word splitting, with _ separators.
• kebab(string $string): string Same smart word splitting, with - separators.
• dotted(string $string): string Same smart word splitting, with . separators.
• dotPath(string $path): string Converts slash-separated or namespace-like paths into dot notation with kebab-cased segments.

Casing helpers

• title(string $string): string Converts the string to title case after smart word splitting.
• words(string $string): string A smarter ucwords() variant that keeps fully-uppercase technical tokens like DB.
• headline(string $string): string Alias of words().
• studly(string $string): string Converts the string to StudlyCase.
• camel(string $string): string Converts the string to camelCase.
• upper(string $string): string Converts the string to uppercase.
• lower(string $string): string Converts the string to lowercase.
• ucfirst(string $string): string Uppercases only the first character.
• lcfirst(string $string): string Lowercases only the first character.
• substr(string $string, int $start, ?int $length = null): string UTF-8 safe substring helper.

Compound Words

Some business or technical terms are better kept intact instead of being split by the generic regex rules. For that, you can register compound words once:

This is useful when your SEO slugs need to reflect business or domain vocabulary more precisely than generic splitting rules can infer on their own.

Important note:

• setCompoundWords() changes package-wide static state for the current PHP process
• if you call it, later StrTo calls in the same process will use that configured list until you replace or clear it

To clear the configured list:

Laravel Comparison

The table below compares Laravel's default Str::slug() behavior with the default StrTo::slug() behavior, without any configured compound words.

Default Slug vs Compound-Word-Aware Slug

The generic slug rules already improve many technical strings, but they cannot always infer business-specific or brand-specific tokens perfectly. When you explicitly register compound words, the slug can become even more intentional.

Examples:

The important idea is not that every string needs configured compounds. The default behavior should stay generic. Compound words are there when your business vocabulary deserves better-than-generic splitting.

Hash Helper

• uniqueHash(int $length = 40): string Generates a monotonic unique hash with a time-derived prefix and random padding.
• minimum supported length is 24

License

MIT