From a title to a URL-friendly slug
A slug is the readable part of a web address, such as my-first-blog-post. It should be short, free of spaces and accents, and stable once the page is online. This page turns any title into such a slug while you type, and handles a whole list at once when you put one title on each line.
Create slugs in five steps
- Type or paste titles into the left box. A sample is there to show the result; Clear empties the box.
- Choose the separator: a hyphen is the usual choice for web addresses, an underscore or a dot suits file names.
- Decide how accents are handled. Removing them turns ä into a, the German style writes ae. Letters such as ß, æ and ł are written out in both modes.
- Set a maximum length if the system you publish to has a limit. A longer slug is cut at the last whole word.
- Press Copy to take all slugs, one per line, or select a single one.
What happens to every character
The text is lowercased, accents are stripped, and apostrophes disappear so that don't becomes dont. Every other run of spaces and symbols turns into a single separator, and separators at the start and end are trimmed. With the default setting only a to z and digits remain, which is the safest form for a URL.
Other alphabets and what to expect
Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Chinese letters are not transliterated, so a title in those alphabets gives an empty slug while the ASCII-only option is on. Turn the option off to keep their letters; modern browsers show such addresses correctly, though they are percent-encoded when copied into some systems. A slug should stay the same once a page is public, because changing it breaks links.
Privacy of your titles
The slugs are computed in your browser. Unpublished titles, draft headlines and product names are not sent to any server, and nothing is stored when you close the tab.