Slug Generator

What the Slug Generator Does

Paste a headline, product name or phrase and you get the slug — the human-readable part of a URL like /best-online-tools — built live as you type. Spaces become hyphens, capitals become lowercase, and anything that is not a letter, digit or hyphen is removed, so the result drops straight into a path.

It is built for clean, predictable slugs rather than clever ones: no dictionary, no stop-word removal, no transliteration. You get exactly the lowercase-letters-digits-and-hyphens version of what you typed, trimmed and de-duplicated.

How It Works

The tool lowercases your text, then removes every character that is not a lowercase letter, a digit, whitespace or a hyphen. It collapses each run of spaces into a single hyphen, reduces any run of hyphens to one, and trims a leading or trailing hyphen so the slug never starts or ends with a dash.

Because the filter is a strict allow-list, accented and non-Latin characters are dropped, not converted. Café Münchner becomes caf-mnchner, and a title written in Cyrillic or Hindi returns an empty slug. If you need transliteration — ü to ue, ß to ss, or romanised Hindi — do that before pasting.

Generation algorithm

1. Lowercase the text. Convert the whole title to lowercase so the slug is case-consistent.
2. Strip to the allow-list. Remove every character except a–z, 0–9, whitespace and hyphen — punctuation, symbols and accented letters are dropped.
3. Spaces to hyphens. Replace each run of whitespace with a single hyphen.
4. Collapse and trim. Reduce any run of hyphens to one and remove a leading or trailing hyphen.

Worked example

The parentheses and exclamation mark are removed entirely; nothing is transliterated and no words are dropped.

Technical Details

Standards & references

• URL syntax (RFC 3986) — the standard's unreserved set is letters, digits, hyphen, period, underscore and tilde; the common slug convention narrows that to lowercase letters, digits and hyphens, which need no percent-encoding.
• Hyphens as word separators (Google) — Google treats a hyphen as a separator between words and an underscore as a joiner, so blue-widgets reads as two words but blue_widgets reads as one. Google's URL guidance recommends hyphens.
• No transliteration — this tool removes characters outside a–z and 0–9 rather than mapping them; é is dropped, not turned into e.

Accuracy & Limitations

It strips rather than transliterates. Accented Latin letters (é, ñ, ü) are removed, and text in non-Latin scripts (Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari) returns an empty slug. For those, transliterate to ASCII before pasting.

An ampersand is removed, not converted to 'and', so 'Q&A tips' becomes qa-tips. If you want the word, type 'and' yourself before generating.

Underscores are stripped, and because no hyphen replaces them the surrounding words join — hello_world becomes helloworld. Use spaces or hyphens between words, not underscores.

It does not remove stop words. Short words like a, the and of stay in the slug; trim them yourself if you want a shorter URL.

It does not shorten or truncate. A very long title produces a very long slug; edit it down and front-load the keywords, since shorter, readable slugs are easier to read and share.

Real-World Use Cases

When to use it — and when not to

Need accents mapped to ASCII (ü to ue, ß to ss) or non-Latin romanised? Transliterate first, then slugify. Want spaces encoded instead of stripped? That is URL-encoding, not a slug — use a URL encoder.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

• Keep a simple URL structure (Google Search Central)
• RFC 3986: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax
• Google still recommends hyphens, not underscores, in URLs (Search Engine Roundtable)

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