Hugo - Taking a video title and turning it into a URL - html

Question

I'm working with Hugo and have a use case where there are a lot of various video titles that all follow roughly the same considerations:
remove all underscores and replace with dashes
remove all dashes with spaces on either side and replace with a dash with no spaces
remove all special characters (? and !) and replace with nothing
remove all periods and replace with dashes
remove all remaining spaces and replace with dashes
everything lowercase
So far I have the following code written out, and I'm trying to figure out how to streamline it.
{{ $step1_title := replace .title "_" " " }}
{{ $step2_title := replace $step1_title " - " "-" }}
{{ $step3_title := replace $step2_title "?" "" }}
{{ $step4_title := replace $step3_title "." "-" }}
{{ $step5_title := replace $step4_title " " "-" | lower }}
{{ $step5_title }}
It seems like a lot of steps, and doesn't account for both ? and !. I'm assuming replaceRE would be more appropriate for that step, yet it won't recognize those characters when defined with [?]|[!]. Any pointers for making the above more efficient would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

For others looking for an answer - Hugo does actually have a built-in function called urlize that does exactly this!
https://gohugo.io/functions/urlize/
For the curious, there is an opposite function that "humanizes" the string and returns it with separators removed and the first letter capitalized:
https://gohugo.io/functions/humanize/