Text to Slug

What the Text to Slug Does

Type a headline, product name or phrase and you get the slug — the readable part of a URL like /best-online-tools — built live. Spaces become hyphens, capitals become lowercase, and anything that is not a letter, digit or hyphen is removed.

It is the same slugify used by our slug generator, offered here as a text utility: a clean, predictable lowercase-letters-digits-and-hyphens version of whatever you type, with no dictionary, stop-word removal or transliteration.

How It Works

The tool lowercases your text, removes every character that is not a lowercase letter, a digit, whitespace or a hyphen, turns each run of spaces into a single hyphen, collapses repeated hyphens, and trims any hyphen from the start or end.

Because the filter is a strict allow-list, accented and non-Latin characters are dropped rather than converted. Café Münchner becomes caf-mnchner, and a title written in Cyrillic or Hindi returns an empty slug. Transliterate to ASCII first if you need those characters kept.

Data source & conversion logic

1. Lowercase and trim. Convert the text to lowercase and trim the ends.
2. Strip to the allow-list. Remove every character except a–z, 0–9, whitespace and hyphen.
3. Spaces to hyphens. Replace each run of whitespace with a single hyphen.
4. Collapse and trim hyphens. Reduce repeated hyphens to one and remove a leading or trailing hyphen.

Worked example

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

Technical Details

Standards & references

• Hyphens as word separators — search engines read a hyphen as a separator between words and an underscore as a joiner, so a hyphenated slug like best-online-tools reads as separate words; this is the recommended convention.
• URL syntax (RFC 3986) — the standard's unreserved characters include letters, digits and the hyphen; a lowercase, hyphenated slug needs no percent-encoding.
• Strips, does not transliterate — characters outside a–z and 0–9 are removed rather than mapped, so an accented é is dropped, not turned into e.

Accuracy & Limitations

It strips rather than transliterates. Accented Latin letters and non-Latin scripts are removed, so Café becomes caf and a fully non-Latin title returns an empty slug. Transliterate to ASCII before pasting if you need those characters.

An ampersand is removed, not converted to 'and', so 'Q and A tips' kept as words works but a literal ampersand vanishes. Underscores are stripped too, and because no hyphen replaces them the words join — hello_world becomes helloworld.

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

It does not shorten or truncate. A long title makes a long slug; edit it down and front-load the keywords, since shorter slugs read and share better.

It is the same slugify as our slug generator. If you have used that tool, this produces identical output — it is offered here as a text-tools entry point.

Real-World Use Cases

When to use it — and when not to

Need accents mapped to ASCII or non-Latin romanised? Transliterate first, then slugify. Want the same thing framed for SEO URLs? The slug generator uses identical logic. Want spaces encoded instead of stripped? That is URL-encoding, not a slug.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

• Keep a simple URL structure (Google Search Central)
• RFC 3986: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax
• Clean URL (Wikipedia)

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