Text to Slug Converter

A slug is the part of a URL a person actually reads, and it has to survive being typed, emailed and read aloud. Text to Slug reduces a headline to letters, digits and one separator, transliterating 29 accented characters on the way through so café arrives as cafe rather than losing the letter altogether.

Anything that is not a letter, a digit or whitespace becomes a space first, and only then are whitespace runs collapsed into your separator. That ordering is what stops C++ / Rust from producing a string of empty gaps: the punctuation turns into spaces, the spaces collapse to one, and the answer is c-rust. Leading and trailing separators are trimmed last.

Three buttons cover hyphen -, underscore _ and dot ., with Lowercase output ticked by default. Two preview cards below show the slug sitting inside a blog path and a root path, so you judge the finished URL rather than the fragment. It all happens on the page.

Worked Example: Turning a Headline Into a URL

Type Q3 Pricing Update: What's Changing (and Why) into the field. With the default hyphen and lowercase on, the slug card returns q3-pricing-update-what-s-changing-and-why. Watch the apostrophe: it becomes a space and then a separator, so what's splits into what-s rather than closing up into whats. The card underneath reads https://yoursite.com/blog/q3-pricing-update-what-s-changing-and-why. Switch to the dot separator and the same input yields q3.pricing.update.what.s.changing.and.why.

What Happens When Accents Meet Capital Letters

• The transliteration table stores lowercase forms only, and the lowercasing runs first, which is why Lowercase output is what makes accents work at all. Untick it and CAFÉ yields CAF, since É never matches the table and is then dropped as a non-alphanumeric. A lowercase é is unaffected either way.
• Ligatures expand instead of collapsing. æ becomes ae, œ becomes oe, ß becomes ss and þ becomes th, so a German or Icelandic word keeps its syllables.
• Characters outside those 29 are removed rather than transliterated. Cyrillic, Greek and CJK text yields an empty slug and the card falls back to its grey your-slug-appears-here placeholder.
• Digits pass through untouched and no length cap applies, so a 200-character headline becomes a 200-character slug. Shorten it yourself before publishing.
• Doubled separators cannot occur, because a separator is only ever written in place of a collapsed whitespace run. A title ending in punctuation likewise cannot leave a trailing one.