Text to Slug

About Text to Slug

A slug is the clean, readable part of a URL — the my-first-post in example.com/blog/my-first-post. This turns a title or heading into one: lowercase, spaces and punctuation replaced by hyphens, accents flattened, so the result is safe to drop into a web address. Bloggers, developers and CMS users reach for it when setting page URLs, permalinks, file names, IDs or anchor links, where a tidy slug is better for readability and SEO than an auto-generated string of numbers.

How it works

The text goes through a few steps:

1. Unicode normalisation (NFKD) splits accented letters into a base letter plus a combining mark, and the combining marks are stripped — so café becomes cafe and naïve becomes naive.
2. Optionally lowercase the text (on by default for conventional slugs).
3. Every run of characters that isn't a letter or digit is replaced by your chosen separator (a hyphen by default, or an underscore).
4. Leading/trailing separators are trimmed and any repeats are collapsed to one.

The result updates live as you type.

Assumptions and defaults

• Separator defaults to a hyphen (-), the web convention for slugs; underscore is available as an alternative.
• Lowercasing is on by default, since slugs are conventionally lowercase.
• Accented Latin letters are transliterated by stripping their accents (é→e), so common European text produces sensible ASCII slugs.
• Only a–z, A–Z and 0–9 survive as slug characters; everything else becomes a separator.

Limitations

• Non-Latin scripts don't transliterate. Because it works by stripping accents from Latin letters, characters with no Latin base — Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, emoji — have nothing to reduce to and are dropped. A title written entirely in such a script can produce an empty or hyphen-only slug.
• It doesn't romanise or translate — it won't turn Москва into moskva or 東京 into tokyo.
• It doesn't remove stop words ("the", "a") or shorten long titles; the whole title becomes the slug.
• Some accented characters that don't decompose under NFKD (like ß or ø) may be dropped rather than converted.

Privacy

Slug generation runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never uploaded or stored.