A slug is the human-readable, URL-safe part of a web address that identifies a specific page, e.g. the "my-post" in example.com/blog/my-post. It is lowercase, uses hyphens or underscores instead of spaces, and drops punctuation.

Why are accented letters converted (é becomes e)?

Slugs are meant to be ASCII-safe so links work everywhere. The tool decomposes accented letters into a base letter plus a separate accent mark (Unicode NFD normalization), then removes the accent mark — so "café" becomes "cafe".

Slug Generator — URL Slug from Any Text

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Walk-through

How to Use This Calculator

4 steps

1

Paste your text

Type or paste a title, product name, or sentence into the Slug box. The output updates live as you type — there's no Calculate button.

2

Set your options

Switch to the Options tab to choose a Hyphen or Underscore separator, Lowercase or Keep-case, and whether to strip small stopwords like "a" and "the". These settings apply everywhere.

3

Copy or share

Copy the slug straight from the result card, or hit Share to copy a link that restores your exact text and settings for a colleague.

4

Process many at once

Switch to the Bulk tab, paste a whole list of titles (one per line), and get back a matching list of slugs — plus a CSV export for spreadsheets.

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Reference

Formula & Methodology

1 formula

Slug generation steps

text → NFC normalize → strip accents → (lowercase) → replace non-alphanumeric runs with separator → collapse repeats → trim ends

The tool first Unicode-normalizes the text, then strips accents by decomposing each accented letter into a base letter plus a separate accent mark (NFD normalization) and deleting the accent mark — so "café" becomes "cafe". If Lowercase is selected, the text is lowercased next. Every run of characters that isn't a letter or digit (spaces, punctuation, symbols) is replaced with a single separator. Repeated separators are then collapsed into one, and any separator left at the very start or end is trimmed off.

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Glossary

Key Terms Explained

6 terms

Slug The human-readable, URL-safe segment of a web address that identifies a specific page, e.g. the "my-post" in example.com/blog/my-post. Slugs are lowercase, use hyphens or underscores instead of spaces, and contain no punctuation.

Separator The character used to join words in a slug in place of spaces. This tool supports a hyphen ( - ), the standard for URLs and SEO, or an underscore ( _ ), sometimes used for filenames or internal identifiers.

Diacritic / accent stripping Removing accent marks from letters (é, ñ, ü, etc.) so the result is plain ASCII. Achieved via Unicode NFD decomposition, which splits an accented letter into a base letter and a combining accent mark that can be discarded separately.

Stopword A common, low-information word — such as "a", "the", "of", or "and" — that can often be dropped from a slug without losing meaning, producing a shorter URL.

Permalink The permanent, canonical URL of a piece of content, typically built from the site's domain plus a slug, e.g. https://example.com/blog/my-post.

Unicode normalization (NFC / NFD) A way of standardizing how text is represented internally. NFC keeps accented characters as single code points; NFD decomposes them into a base character plus combining marks — the form this tool uses to isolate and remove accents.

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Scenarios

Real-World Examples

3 worked examples

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Blogger publishing a new post

Simple title with punctuation

Text My Post! Options Hyphen, Lowercase

The exclamation mark and space are replaced with a single hyphen and lowercased, giving "my-post" — a clean, SEO-friendly slug ready to drop straight into a blog URL.

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Store owner building a product URL

Accents, punctuation, and stopwords

Text Café & Restaurant — Best of 2026! Options Hyphen, Lowercase, Stopwords off

Accents are stripped (Café → Cafe), the ampersand and dash become separators, and everything collapses to "cafe-restaurant-best-of-2026". Turning Strip Stopwords on removes "of", tightening it to "cafe-restaurant-best-2026" — useful when you want the shortest possible product URL.

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Analyst naming an exported file

Underscore separator, case preserved

Text Q3 Sales Report (Final) Options Underscore, Keep case

With Keep case on and Underscore selected, the parentheses become underscores and capitalization is preserved, producing "Q3_Sales_Report_Final" — a filename-friendly identifier rather than a lowercase web slug.

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Deep Dive

How to Turn Any Title Into a Clean URL Slug

3 chapters · 4 min read

A good slug turns a messy title into a short, readable, search-friendly URL segment. This tool automates the four steps every slug generator performs — normalizing, stripping accents, replacing punctuation, and trimming — so you don't have to hand-edit URLs one character at a time.

How the Slug Generator works

The algorithm runs in a fixed order: Unicode-normalize the text, strip accents by decomposing each accented letter and discarding its accent mark, optionally lowercase everything, then replace every run of non-letter/non-digit characters with a single separator. If stopword stripping is on, short filler words are removed next. Finally, repeated separators collapse into one and any leading or trailing separator is trimmed.

The tool intentionally keeps all Unicode letters and digits rather than restricting to ASCII a-z0-9 — this means non-Latin scripts (Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.) are preserved as their own characters rather than being deleted, though they are not transliterated into Latin letters.

Hyphens vs. underscores — which should you use?

For anything that will live in a public URL, use a hyphen. Google and other search engines treat a hyphen as a word boundary ("my-post" is read as two words, "my" and "post"), but treat an underscore as joining the words into one token ("my_post" reads closer to "mypost"). Underscores are still useful for filenames, database keys, or internal identifiers where SEO doesn't apply — the Options tab supports both.

Accents, stopwords, and non-Latin text — limits to know

Accent stripping only removes combining diacritical marks; it does not attempt full transliteration, so a word like "naïve" becomes "naive" but a Japanese or Arabic phrase is preserved character-for-character rather than converted into a Latin approximation. The stopword list is short and English-only (a, an, the, of, in, on, for, to, and, or, with) — it's meant to trim obviously low-value words from English titles, not to serve as a linguistically complete filter. Leave it off if you want every word kept, or if your text isn't in English.

Privacy: every calculation happens locally in your browser using standard JavaScript string methods. Nothing you type or paste is sent to a server.

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Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

6 questions

What is a URL slug?+

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page — the "my-post" in example.com/blog/my-post. Good slugs are short, lowercase, and use hyphens instead of spaces, so they're both readable and search-engine friendly.

Does this send my text to a server?+

No. Everything runs locally in your browser using standard JavaScript string functions — normalize(), replace(), and toLowerCase(). Nothing you type or paste is uploaded anywhere, and the tool works the same with or without an internet connection once the page has loaded.

Why are accented letters converted, like é becoming e?+

Slugs are meant to be safe in any URL, and accented characters can cause encoding or compatibility issues in some systems. The tool decomposes an accented letter into a plain base letter plus a separate accent mark using Unicode NFD normalization, then drops the accent mark — so "café" becomes "cafe".

What happens to non-Latin text, like Chinese or Arabic?+

Unicode letters and digits are kept as-is; only runs of spaces and punctuation are replaced with the separator. The tool does not transliterate non-Latin scripts into Latin letters — that's a deliberate v1 simplification. If you need Pinyin-style romanization or similar, you'll need a dedicated transliteration tool.

Should I use a hyphen or an underscore?+

Use a hyphen for anything that will appear in a public URL — search engines like Google read a hyphen as a word separator but read an underscore as joining two words into one token, which can hurt how your page's individual words are indexed. Underscores are fine for filenames or internal identifiers where SEO doesn't matter.

Why would I strip stopwords, and is the list complete?+

Stripping small words like "a", "the", or "and" produces a shorter, more scannable slug — useful for long blog titles. The built-in list (a, an, the, of, in, on, for, to, and, or, with) is short and English-only, not an exhaustive stopword dictionary, so leave the option off if you want every word preserved or your text isn't in English.

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Slug Generator