Text to URL Slug Converter

A text to URL slug converter turns a title into the readable path segment that identifies a page, the creme-brulee-guide part of /blog/creme-brulee-guide. Lowercase ASCII words joined by hyphens is the form every server, CDN, and analytics tool handles without encoding, and Google's URL guidelines recommend hyphens rather than underscores because hyphens read as word breaks.

The conversion runs in a fixed order. Transliteration comes first: each non-ASCII character is looked up in a table covering the Latin-1 and Latin Extended-A letters, so é becomes e, ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae, œ becomes oe, ł becomes l, and þ becomes th. Accented Latin letters outside the table lose their marks through Unicode decomposition, so Romanian ș becomes s. Letters with no ASCII form, such as Cyrillic, Greek, or Chinese, are removed, and a note under the slug says how many were dropped. German umlauts become a, o, and u by default, or ae, oe, and ue to follow German spelling, which writes Müller as Mueller when umlauts are unavailable.

Lowercasing follows, then the optional removal of digits. Apostrophes, whether straight, curly, or a backtick, are deleted rather than replaced, so a possessive such as chef's stays one word, chefs, instead of splitting into chef-s. Every remaining run of characters that are not ASCII letters or digits, including spaces, punctuation, and symbols, becomes a single separator, and separators at either end are trimmed. With transliteration off, letters and digits of every script are kept, which produces an internationalized slug; browsers display it as typed but send it percent-encoded, so the six Cyrillic letters of москва travel as 36 characters, %D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B2%D0%B0.

Stop-word removal drops whole words from a fixed list of 16 (a, an, the, and, or, but, in, on, at, to, for, of, with, by, is, it) in any letter case. It shortens slugs but can change meaning: "to be or not to be" reduces to be-not-be. The maximum length counts characters in the finished slug. A cut that ends exactly on a word boundary is kept; otherwise the slug backs up to the last separator so no word is split, and only a single first word longer than the limit is cut mid-word. Settings holds the separator, the transliteration and umlaut choices, letter case, the length limit, and the digit and stop-word filters; the length shown under the slug is the count after every step.

"Crème Brûlée & Müsli: A Chef's Guide (2024 Edition!)" becomes creme-brulee-musli-a-chefs-guide-2024-edition, 45 characters: eight words holding 38 letters and digits, joined by seven hyphens. The ampersand, colon, parentheses, and exclamation mark each collapse into a hyphen or disappear at the end, and the apostrophe vanishes. German umlaut spelling gives creme-brulee-muesli-a-chefs-guide-2024-edition, 46 characters. Stop-word removal drops the lone "a" for creme-brulee-musli-chefs-guide-2024-edition, 43 characters. A 30-character limit lands inside "guide", so the slug backs up to creme-brulee-musli-a-chefs, 26 characters.

URL slugs are the human-readable part of a web address, read by search engines and by people deciding whether to click. Generating them from raw titles with one fixed rule set prevents the usual hand-editing mistakes: double hyphens, trailing separators, stray capitals, and unencoded special characters.

• Blog Publishing: Convert article titles into URL-friendly paths before publishing. A title like "10 Tips for Better Sleep" becomes 10-tips-for-better-sleep, or 10-tips-better-sleep with stop words removed for a shorter path.
• E-commerce Product Pages: Product names with dimensions, model numbers, and parentheses become consistent catalog URLs. "Oak 6-Drawer Dresser (2024 Model)" becomes oak-6-drawer-dresser-2024-model without manual cleanup.
• Content Migration: When content moves between platforms, running every title through the same settings keeps the new URLs predictable, which makes the redirect map from old to new addresses easier to build and check.
• Multilingual Websites: French, German, Spanish, Polish, and Romanian titles transliterate to ASCII-only slugs, with the German ae, oe, ue spelling available for German-language sites. Sites that prefer native-script URLs can keep them by turning transliteration off.
• API Endpoint Design: Derive resource identifiers from display names when building RESTful APIs. "User Profile Settings" becomes user-profile-settings or user_profile_settings depending on the API naming convention.
• File Naming Conventions: The same rules produce portable file names. Underscores suit conventions that reserve hyphens, digit removal drops version numbers handled elsewhere, and a length limit keeps names within filesystem constraints.
• Static Site Generators: Hugo, Jekyll, and Eleventy read a slug field from each post's front matter; generating it from the title keeps the YAML or TOML value consistent with the site's other URLs.
• Database Record Identifiers: Create URL-safe keys for database records derived from user-submitted titles or names, ensuring no whitespace, special characters, or encoding issues in lookups and routing.
• Social Media Links: Produce concise, keyword-rich slug segments for vanity URLs on link-shortening services, where every character counts.