Text to Slug Converter

The Text to Slug tool converts titles, headings, and any text into URL-friendly slugs — lowercase, hyphen-separated, ASCII-only strings safe for URLs, file names, and identifiers. Handles tricky cases: accented characters (café → cafe), Unicode transliteration (北京 → beijing), punctuation removal, whitespace collapse, and length limits. Customizable: separator character (- default, _ for SQL-friendly), case (lowercase default, uppercase option), Unicode handling (transliterate, strip, or preserve).

Good URL slugs are critical for SEO and UX. /blog/how-to-set-up-docker-for-nodejs-apps is readable, shareable, memorable, and includes keywords. /blog/post-123 is none of those. Every CMS (WordPress, Jekyll, Hugo, Ghost, Contentful) uses slugs for post URLs. Modern frameworks (Next.js, Remix) use them for routing. This converter handles all the edge cases — making slugs from complex titles in any language instantly.

Slug generation involves several transformations:

Standard process:

1. Unicode normalization (NFKD for separating base + diacritics)
2. Strip diacritics (é → e, ñ → n)
3. Transliterate non-Latin (optional: 北京 → beijing, Москва → moskva)
4. Lowercase
5. Replace non-alphanumeric with separator
6. Collapse consecutive separators
7. Trim leading/trailing separators
8. Optionally limit length

Handling different character sets:

Latin with accents:
- café → cafe (strip diacritics)
- naïve → naive
- jalapeño → jalapeno
- Zürich → zurich

Cyrillic:
- Москва → moskva (transliteration)
- Санкт-Петербург → sankt-peterburg

Greek:
- Αθήνα → athina (transliteration)

CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean):
- No clean romanization — options:
- Transliterate with Pinyin/Hepburn: 北京 → beijing, 東京 → tokyo
- Leave as Unicode in URL (modern approach, supports IDN)
- Use English alternative if provided

Arabic:
- القاهرة → al-qahirah (transliteration)

Special characters:
- Spaces → separator
- & → and (common convention), or separator
- Emoji → removed (URLs with emoji are unreliable)
- Quotes, apostrophes → removed
- Slashes, question marks, hashes → removed (URL special chars)
- Underscores: controversial — some keep, some replace with hyphen

Edge cases:

- Empty result: if input is all non-ASCII (all emoji or unknown chars), result is empty. Handle with fallback: post-{id}.
- Duplicate slugs: two posts with same title produce same slug. Most CMSs add suffix: my-post-2.
- Length limits: URLs should be under 2,000 chars. Slugs under ~80 chars. Truncate with care (do not cut words mid-way).
- Reserved words: admin, api, static, robots.txt — some CMSs reject these.

Separator conventions:

- Hyphen (-) — universal choice, readable, Google-preferred. Use this.
- Underscore (_) — works but less common for URLs. Google treats hyphen as word separator; underscore as word joiner. Hyphen for SEO.
- Plus (+) — legacy form-encoded style. Avoid.

SEO implications:

Google treats hyphens in URLs as spaces (my-new-post → my new post). Helps keyword matching in URLs. Use hyphens, not underscores, for SEO.

URL-safe characters per RFC 3986:

Unreserved: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, -, _, ., ~.
Reserved (need encoding): /, ?, #, &, everything else.

A proper slug uses only unreserved characters — never needs URL encoding.

Slug vs URL encoding: Slug is clean, human-readable (my-post-title). URL encoding escapes special chars as %20, %26 (my%20post%20title). Slugs better for SEO and UX; encoding only for runtime values.

Hyphen vs underscore: Google treats hyphens as word separators, underscores as word joiners. my-page = my page to Google; my_page = my_page. Use hyphens for SEO URLs.

ASCII-only vs Unicode URLs: ASCII (my-page) is universally supported. Unicode (my-página) works in modern browsers (IDN) but has compatibility issues with some tools, email clients, analytics. ASCII is safer.

Slug vs SEO keyword URL: Slug: straightforward representation of title. SEO-optimized URL: includes target keywords, may not match title exactly. Both valid; depend on SEO strategy.

Auto-generated vs manual slugs: Auto-generated (WordPress default) often good but may include stopwords (the, a) or be too long. Manual slugs are shorter and keyword-focused. Good editors review and customize before publishing.

Truncation strategies: Simple truncate at N chars may cut words. Better: truncate at last complete word under limit. Smart truncation preserves meaning.