Slug Generator

What is a URL slug?

A slug is the readable part of a URL that names one page, such as my-first-post in /blog/my-first-post/. A good slug uses only lowercase ASCII letters, digits and hyphens, so it never needs percent-encoding, reads well when the link is shared, and tells people and search engines what the page is about before they open it. This tool turns a title into that form as you type.

How to use the slug generator

1. Type or paste a title into the Text field. The slug updates on every keystroke.
2. Choose a Separator: Hyphen (-) or Underscore (_).
3. Leave Lowercase ticked for URLs; untick it to keep the original capitals.
4. Click Copy. A dash in the result box means nothing usable was left.

Exactly what the tool does to your text

1. Splits accented letters into a base letter plus accent (Unicode NFD) and drops the accent, so é, ç and ş become e, c and s.
2. Replaces Latin letters that have no accent to drop: ß → ss, æ → ae, œ → oe, ø → o, ł → l, đ and ð → d, þ → th and the Turkish dotless ı → i.
3. Removes apostrophes, straight or curly, so don't becomes dont rather than don-t.
4. Lowercases the text if Lowercase is ticked.
5. Replaces every run of characters other than A–Z, a–z and 0–9 with one separator, and trims separators from both ends.

The tool does not remove stop words, shorten long titles or check whether a slug is already in use. Those are editorial decisions, covered below.

Examples

The same steps in JavaScript

If you need slugs inside an application, this function follows steps 1, 3, 4 and 5 above with hyphens. Add a lookup table for step 2 if your titles include letters such as ß or ø.

function slugify(text) {
  return text.normalize('NFD').replace(/[\u0300-\u036f]/g, '')
    .replace(/['\u2019]/g, '')
    .toLowerCase()
    .replace(/[^a-z0-9]+/g, '-')
    .replace(/^-+|-+$/g, '');
}

slugify('Crème Brûlée: Don’t Panic!'); // 'creme-brulee-dont-panic'

Generate the slug once, when the page is created, and store it. Working it out again from the title on every request means that fixing a typo in a title silently changes the URL.

Hyphen or underscore?

Use hyphens in URLs. Google’s URL structure guidelines recommend hyphens rather than underscores to separate words, and hyphens stay visible when a link is underlined. Underscores are useful elsewhere: file names, database table and column names, and Python module names, which cannot contain a hyphen.

Common problems and fixes

Frequently asked questions

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