Quick Tip: Check to See if a Slug Exists in WordPress

Recently I was doing some work where I was importing RSS entries into a Custom Post Type in WordPress. Since there were no common IDs between the feed and WordPress, to prevent duplicate entries I tried comparing titles. This also proved to be an issue as titles aren’t always unique, and they weren’t in this case. I settled on comparing slugs; WordPress creates a unique slug for each post from the title, and there’s a way to know what that slug is going to be before the post is added.

Assuming that our RSS entries are in an Object called $item, we do this to get the slug:

$title= wp_strip_all_tags($item->title);
 $slug = sanitize_title($title);

The first function will remove all HTML tags from the title that was passed in; it was unclear if the next function, sanitize_title(), did that, so I took the extra precaution.

sanitize_title() is where the magic happens. It takes a now HTML-less string and converts it to a string that can be used in URLs; this is the would-be slug. You can then pass that slug to this query to see if a post with this slug already exists:

$post_if = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT count(post_title) FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_name like '".$slug."'");

If $post_if is < 1 at this point, the post doesn’t exist. Do with it what you will! If that’s the specific slug you want to use, you can also add it to the post array like this(assuming you’re using $post_array):

$post_array['post_name'] = $slug;

And there you have it! Feel free to comment your thoughts, improvements, and clarifications.