Text to Slug Converter

A "slug" is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page in a readable way — the `my-first-blog-post` in `example.com/blog/my-first-blog-post`, or the `wireless-mouse` in `example.com/products/wireless-mouse`. Slugs matter for three practical reasons: search engines and users can both read them (a URL that spells out the page's topic is more trustworthy and more clickable than an opaque numeric ID), they need to survive being pasted into browsers, chat apps, and HTML attributes without escaping, and they need to stay stable and unique as an identifier over the page's lifetime. None of that works with a raw page title — titles have spaces, capital letters, punctuation, and often accented or non-Latin characters, none of which belong in a URL path segment. This tool automates the standard slugification recipe. First, the input is lowercased, since URLs are conventionally all-lowercase (mixed-case URLs technically work but create duplicate-content and case-sensitivity headaches on servers that treat paths as case-sensitive). Second, accented and decorated Latin letters are reduced to their plain ASCII equivalent — é, è, ê and ë all become e; ñ becomes n; ö becomes o; and Romanian-specific letters like ș and ț (s and t with a comma below) become s and t. This is done with `String.prototype.normalize('NFD')`, which decomposes a precomposed accented character into a base letter plus one or more separate "combining mark" characters (é becomes the letter e followed by a separate U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT character); a follow-up regular expression then strips every character in the Unicode combining-marks range, leaving just the plain base letters behind. Third, every run of one or more characters that is not a lowercase a–z letter or a 0–9 digit — spaces, punctuation, symbols, emoji, or accented characters that could not be decomposed to something a–z0–9 — is collapsed into a single separator character. Finally, any separator left at the very start or end of the result is trimmed off, since a slug should never begin or end with a hyphen. You can choose between a hyphen (`-`) or an underscore (`_`) as the separator. Hyphens are the near-universal convention for web URLs — Google's own SEO guidance and virtually every CMS (WordPress, Shopify, etc.) defaults to hyphens because search engines treat a hyphen as a word boundary the way they treat a space, while an underscore is historically treated by some search engines as joining two words into one token. Underscores remain useful outside of URLs, though — file names, database keys, environment variable names and some programming-language identifier conventions often prefer underscores or forbid hyphens entirely (a hyphen is not a legal character in most programming language identifiers, since it reads as a minus sign). Having both available in one tool covers both use cases without needing to run the output through a second find-and-replace pass. One limitation worth knowing: Unicode's NFD decomposition only helps with scripts where accented letters are built from a base Latin letter plus a combining mark — this covers essentially all of the Latin-alphabet languages (French, German, Spanish, Romanian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Polish, and so on). It does not help with non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic or Greek, where the characters are not decomposable into an ASCII base letter at all — those characters simply fall outside the a–z0–9 range and get replaced by the separator like any other non-alphanumeric character. If your source text is primarily in one of those scripts, this tool will strip it down to nothing useful, and you should instead type a manual ASCII/Latin-transliterated title in the box for slug generation, since a fully general transliteration system (Cyrillic → Latin, Japanese romanization, and so on) is a much larger and more opinionated undertaking than what a lightweight browser widget can reasonably do correctly.