Question/Bug: how do I preserve dashes and not replace them with separator?

[adamcunnington-mlg]

I am trying to slugify a string, replacing non-matching characters with an underscore, but I don't want to consider a dash a non-matching character. This is easily achieved with regex but it looks like there is some special slugify behaviour when it comes to dashes which is preventing this working. I can't see anything in the docs or code, about how to work around this.

What did I do?

slugify.slugify("test-foo bar", separator='_', regex_pattern=r'[^-a-zA-Z0-9_]+')

What happened?
test_foo_bar

What did I expect?
test-foo_bar

[adamcunnington-mlg]

Pretty sure it is a big, caused by https://github.com/un33k/python-slugify/blob/master/slugify/slugify.py#L179

Looks like there is a test case missing.

[adamcunnington-mlg]

@un33k

[un33k]

Please note that '-' is a reserved character in slugs. This package allows an atomic replacement of the default separator of '-' with something else towards the end of the process.

A simple preprocess of the text is recommended for special cases.

All PRs are considered provided they remain backward compatible.

[adamcunnington-mlg]

Ok, I think this is definitely PR-worthy. I agree that '-' is a reserved character - but this is precisely the reason why you shouldn't remove them. I can pre-process the string; sure; but this seems a bit broken.

Will find time to raise PR but I'm not sure how this can remain backwards compatible as this would be changing (fixing) behaviour where input string contains a - character. Do you imagine this being behind a feature toggle that defaults to current behaviour perhaps?

[adamcunnington-mlg]

Also, there's a logical problem with the suggested workaround. Pre-processing the string is highly problematic - what character am I going to replace - with, before I pass it to a call to slugify that is going to replace characters that don't match my regex? I have a very limited set of options and whatever I choose could legitimately appear elsewhere in the string and be erroneously substituted by the post-processing.

The only thing I could do is replace - with some string that i think is going to be reasonably unique. This is brittle and bad. This behaviour should belong to slugify.

[un33k]

I think we have examples on how to handle this situation.

python-slugify/test.py

Line 94 in a90d967

def test_multi_character_separator(self):

[un33k]

Closing this now, feel free to reopen if the above example is not addressing your needs and/or you have a non-breaking PR.

[PradeepTammali]

I am facing the same issue here. I have a text like this 121232-some text here-some text here again
Trying to slugify the text with separator ' '. Expecting the output 121232-some text here-some text here again but got 121232 some text here some text here again

Is there any work around for this.

[adamcunnington-mlg]

@PradeepTammali workaround is something like this:

s = str.replace('-', 'thisSucks')
slugify(s, separator='_', regex_pattern='[^a-zA-Z0-9_]+').replace('thisSucks', '-')

[un33k]

@PradeepTammali Slugify needs one reserved character, and since the name of the package is slugify its job is to convert some random text to a dash-delimited clean text for use in URLs. With that said, the delimiter can also be changed to whatever user wants. In short, the ask here is not doable. I encourage channelling one's energy to raising a meaningful PR instead.