Slug Generator

How to turn a title into a URL slug

Paste it on the left. The slug appears on the right as you type.

Paste a whole list, one title per line, and you get one slug per line back with the original above each so you can check them at a glance. That is the case this is actually built for: a content plan of forty headlines, not one title at a time.

Why there are no settings

Because there is one correct answer.

Lowercase, hyphens between words, ASCII letters and digits only. WordPress, Ghost, Next.js, Hugo, Jekyll and every CMS in between agree, and a slug in any other shape is a slug that something downstream will silently rewrite.

Underscores are the one that tempts people. Google has treated the hyphen as a word separator and the underscore as a joiner since the mid-2000s, so text_tools reads as one word and text-tools reads as two. Use hyphens.

The order that has to be right

Accents come off before the filter to ASCII, never after.

Filter first and every accented letter simply fails the test and is deleted, so "crème brûlée" becomes crme-brle, which is the single most common bug in hand-rolled slug functions. Strip the accents first and you get creme-brulee.

The same applies to the letters that do not decompose. A Polish stroked l or a German sharp s has no accent to remove, so a naive pass drops it entirely and Łódź becomes dz. Here they are mapped: lodz.

Two smaller ones in the same family. Hyphens are collapsed after the filter, or the gaps left by removed punctuation become runs of hyphens. And leading and trailing hyphens are trimmed last of all, since trimming before the collapse leaves one behind on any title ending in punctuation.

Apostrophes join, they do not separate

"Don't Stop" is two words, not three.

An apostrophe inside a word is part of it, so it is removed rather than replaced with a hyphen. dont-stop, not don-t-stop. Both the straight and the curly form are handled, since a title written in a word processor will have the curly one.

What not to put in a slug

The date. The category. The year. The word "the" at the front.

All of them make the URL longer, none of them help anyone find the page, and the first two break the day you reorganise the site. What belongs in a slug is the handful of words that describe the page, and nothing else.

The two tools next to this one

The case converter is the one for changing case without touching anything else, including the programmer forms if the destination is code rather than a URL.

The accent remover does just the accent half, for a filename or a database key where you want the punctuation and spacing left alone.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.