Posting umlaute here resulted in a mess. Heres a version of the same function that works with preg_replace only:
<?php
  function getRewriteString($sString) {
     $string = strtolower(htmlentities($sString));
     $string = preg_replace("/&(.)(uml);/", "$1e", $string);
     $string = preg_replace("/&(.)(acute|cedil|circ|ring|tilde|uml);/", "$1", $string);
     $string = preg_replace("/([^a-z0-9]+)/", "-", html_entity_decode($string));
     $string = trim($string, "-");
     return $string;
  }
?>