Online Tool Store
Slug Generator
Turn titles into clean URL slugs one at a time or in bulk, with proper handling of the letters normalisation deletes, word-safe truncation and collision warnings.
🔒 This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded to a server.
Example shown — replace it with your own.
How to use it
- Paste a title, or a whole list of them — one per line.
- Pick a separator, a case and a maximum length.
- Copy one slug, or all of them at once.
- Watch the counter: it tells you if two titles produce the same slug.
Normalisation alone silently eats letters
The standard recipe for a slug is: normalise to NFD, strip the combining marks, keep only ASCII. It works beautifully for French and German umlauts and fails badly elsewhere, because it assumes every accented letter is stored as a base letter plus an accent. Many are not:
é → U+65 U+301 base + mark → strips to e ✓
å → U+61 U+30A base + mark → strips to a ✓
ø → U+F8 one character → deleted ✗
ß → U+DF one character → deleted ✗
ł → U+142 one character → deleted ✗
The results are not subtle. With normalisation alone:
København → k-benhavn
Straße → stra-e
Łódź → odz ← the first letter is gone
Ísafjörður → isafjor-ur
Æther → ther
So a transliteration pass runs first, turning ß into ss, ø into o, æ into ae, þ into th and so on. The same titles then
come out as kobenhavn,
strasse, lodz,
isafjordur and aether.
You can untick the option to watch the letters disappear.
Truncating at a word, not at a character
Length limits are usually applied by slicing the string, which leaves slugs ending mid-word. Cutting back to the last separator instead keeps the slug readable — unless that would throw away more than half of it, in which case the hard cut is the lesser evil:
naive slice an-introduction-to-photogr
at a break an-introduction-to
Collisions are the failure nobody plans for
Two different titles can produce identical slugs — "The Best Tools!" and "the best tools" are the obvious case, but so
are any two titles differing only in punctuation. In a CMS that means one page quietly overwrites another, or you get
an unhelpful -2 suffix. Paste your whole list in here and the counter
tells you before your database does.
When a slug cannot be made at all
For a title in Japanese, Arabic or Cyrillic there is nothing to transliterate to without language-specific rules — and those rules genuinely differ by language, not just by script. Rather than inventing something, the tool tells you nothing survived and shows the percent-encoded form. That is a perfectly valid URL, and it is what most modern sites do for non-Latin titles; browsers display it back as readable text even though the bytes on the wire are escaped.
FAQ
What is a URL slug?
The readable part of a URL that identifies a page — the "slug-generator" in this page's address. Keeping it lower case, hyphenated and free of anything that needs escaping means it survives being copied, pasted, shortened and printed.
Why do some accented letters work and others vanish?
Because only some of them are stored as a letter plus an accent. Unicode normalisation can split é into e plus a combining mark and then drop the mark — but ø, ß, ł, đ, þ and ð are single characters with no decomposition at all, so a normalise-then-strip-to-ASCII approach simply deletes them. København becomes k-benhavn and Łódź becomes odz. This tool maps those letters explicitly first.
Should I use hyphens or underscores?
Hyphens. Search engines have long treated a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joiner, so "slug_generator" can read as one token where "slug-generator" reads as two words. Underscores are offered because filenames and some systems prefer them, but for a public URL the hyphen is the safer default.
Should I remove words like "the" and "of"?
Usually not. It shortens the slug but it can also make it read oddly, and modern search engines are not counting your stop words. The switch is there for cases where the length limit genuinely bites — and it will never strip a title down to nothing.
How long should a slug be?
Short enough to read at a glance; there is no hard technical limit worth worrying about. The important detail is where it gets cut: this tool truncates at a separator rather than mid-word, so a shortened slug still ends on a whole word instead of something like "introduction-to-photogr".
What about Japanese, Arabic or Cyrillic titles?
A character map cannot do those properly — real transliteration needs language-specific rules, and the right answer differs by language even for the same script. Rather than guessing, the tool says nothing survived and shows you the percent-encoded form, which is a legitimate URL and what most modern sites use for non-Latin titles.
How we compare
| Feature | Online Tool Store | Other slug generators | Your CMS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Handles ø, ß, ł, đ, þ and ð | ✓ | Often deletes them | Varies wildly |
| Batch — a whole list at once | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Warns about duplicate slugs | ✓ | ✗ | Silently suffixes |
| Truncates at a word boundary | ✓ | Usually a hard cut | Usually a hard cut |
| Says when a title cannot be slugged | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Proper transliteration of non-Latin scripts | ✗ | Sometimes, often badly | With a plugin |
| Checks the slug is free on your site | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
Useful when you are planning a set of URLs rather than typing one — it handles the letters that quietly disappear elsewhere and warns you about collisions before your CMS does. It cannot know what is already published on your site, and it will not pretend to transliterate a script it has no rules for.