Slug Generator
Turn any title into a clean URL-friendly slug, handling accents, punctuation and non-Latin script — with the reasons short, stable slugs matter.
Two different titles can land on one URL
Making a slug means stripping accents, folding case, deleting punctuation and collapsing runs of separators. Every one of those is deliberate — it is what makes the result typeable and stable — and every one destroys a distinction the title had:
| These titles… | all become |
|---|---|
Café Society Cafe Society CAFE SOCIETY café society! | cafe-society |
C++ Guide C# Guide C Guide | c-guide |
Rock & Roll Rock Roll | rock-roll |
naïve naive | naive |
The C++ and C# case is the one worth remembering, because it is not
an obscure Unicode corner — two entirely different topics, one URL. Symbol stripping cannot
tell a plus from a hash, and neither survives as a character a URL carries comfortably.
| Step | What it discards |
|---|---|
| Accent stripping | café and cafe, naïve and naive, Ångström and Angstrom |
| Case folding | iOS and IOS, and any title that used capitals meaningfully |
| Symbol removal | C++ and C#, R&D and R D, 24/7 and 24 7 |
| Separator collapsing | double spaces, tabs, and any run of punctuation |
Which does not mean it happens often
Collisions are trivial to construct and, with names a person chose, rare. Running this same slug function over all 945 tool names on this site produced none at all.
That is the honest shape of the risk. It is not that slugs collide constantly — it is that nothing stops them, so a slug cannot be used as a key without a uniqueness check behind it. The titles most likely to clash are the ones differing only in punctuation, and those are exactly the titles people write.
The usual fix is to keep the slug for humans and a separate identifier for the system, or to
append a short suffix on the second occurrence — cafe-society-2 — which is what
most publishing tools do. What does not work is assuming the title was distinctive enough.
How to use
- Paste your title or heading.
- Read the generated slug.
- Shorten it by hand if it runs long.
- Do not change a slug once the page is published.
Frequently asked questions
What is a slug?
The human-readable part of a URL identifying a page — the last segment after the final slash. A good one is lowercase, uses hyphens between words, and describes the page well enough to be understood without the page title.
Hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Search engines have long treated a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so an underscored slug can read as one long word. Hyphens are also the near-universal convention, which matters more than the technical difference.
What happens to accented characters?
They are transliterated to their closest ASCII equivalent, so an e-acute becomes e. Accented characters are legal in modern URLs but are percent-encoded when shared, producing an unreadable mess, so transliteration keeps links legible.
How long should a slug be?
Short enough to read at a glance — three to six words is usually right. Very long slugs get truncated in search results and are awkward to share, while a slug of one generic word is often ambiguous. The aim is that someone seeing only the URL can tell what the page is.
Should I remove words like 'the' and 'and'?
Usually yes, where the meaning survives. They add length without adding meaning or search value. Keep them where removing them changes the sense or makes the slug read strangely — clarity beats brevity when the two conflict.
Can I change a slug later?
You can, but it breaks every existing link unless you add a redirect from the old address. Search rankings and inbound links are attached to the URL, so changing it without a redirect discards both. Treat a published slug as permanent.
🔒 This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged, or stored.