URL Slug Generator

What Is the URL Slug Generator?

A "slug" is the URL-friendly version of a title -- lowercase, hyphenated, and free of spaces, accents, or special characters (e.g. "My Blog Post!" becomes "my-blog-post"). This tool converts any text into a clean slug automatically, the same transform most CMS platforms apply when generating a page's URL.

How to Use This Tool

Enter a title or any text, and choose a separator (hyphen or underscore). The slug updates instantly.

How the Conversion Works

Worked Example

Practical Uses

• Generating a clean URL slug for a new blog post or page title
• Creating a URL-safe filename from an arbitrary string
• Matching a CMS's automatic slug generation for consistency

For a more general text-cleanup pass before slugifying, see the Whitespace Trimmer.

Step-by-Step: What Happens to Your Title

The transformation runs in a fixed order, and knowing it explains every result. First the text is decomposed so that an accented letter is split into its base letter plus a separate accent mark. Second, those accent marks are removed. Third, everything is lower-cased and trimmed. Fourth, every run of characters that is not a letter a to z or a digit 0 to 9 is replaced by a single separator. Finally, any separator left at the very start or end is trimmed off. Consider the hypothetical title " Top 10 Tips -- for Beginners (2026 Edition) ". The result with the hyphen option is top-10-tips-for-beginners-2026-edition. The double dash, the parentheses and the extra spaces all collapse into single hyphens, and nothing dangles at either end.

Characters That Do Not Convert the Way You Might Expect

Accent stripping works for letters that decompose into a base letter plus a mark, such as e with an acute accent, u with an umlaut, n with a tilde and c with a cedilla. It does not transliterate letters that are separate characters in their own right. Examples include the German sharp s, the Scandinavian o with a slash, the Polish l with a stroke and the ligature ae. Those characters are not a to z, so they are treated as symbols and replaced with the separator. A name like "Soren" written with the slashed o would come out as "s-ren" rather than "soren". Text in non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic or Greek, contains no a to z letters at all, so a title written entirely in one of those scripts produces an empty slug. If you publish in such a language, decide separately whether your platform allows native-script URLs or whether you will write a Latin transliteration by hand.

Choosing the Separator

The hyphen option is the safe default for web addresses. The underscore option suits identifiers such as file names, database keys or variable-like strings, where hyphens can be awkward because some programming contexts read them as minus signs. Whichever you choose, the tool uses it consistently for the whole string, so you do not get a mix.

Common Mistakes

• Keeping the slug identical to a very long headline. The tool does not shorten anything, so trim filler words such as "the", "a" or "of" yourself if you want a tighter address.
• Changing the slug after a page is published without adding a redirect from the old address, which breaks existing links and bookmarks.
• Forgetting that numbers stay. A title beginning with a year or a list count keeps it, which may date your URL.
• Expecting apostrophes to disappear cleanly. "Don't" becomes "don-t" because the apostrophe is replaced by a separator, so consider rewriting it as "dont" before converting.
• Assuming uniqueness. Two different titles can map to the same slug, so check your site for duplicates.

Use Cases Beyond Blog Posts

The same clean output works for naming downloadable files, generating anchor IDs for headings, creating tags or category keys, and building identifiers from product names in a spreadsheet. For bulk work, run each title through the tool and paste the results into a column next to the originals, then scan for empty results, which flag titles that used only unsupported characters.

Frequently Asked Questions