Text to Slug

The five steps the converter applies

• Decompose accented letters into a base letter plus a separate accent mark (Unicode NFKD), which also expands compatibility characters such as the trademark sign into 'TM' and the fraction ½ into '1⁄2'.
• Delete the accent marks, leaving the plain base letters.
• Lowercase everything.
• Delete every character that is not a letter a to z, a digit, whitespace or a hyphen. Punctuation, symbols, apostrophes and underscores are removed without leaving a gap.
• Trim the ends and replace each run of whitespace or hyphens with a single separator.

Examples of what comes out

The last two rows show a side effect of removing characters without a gap: a slash or an apostrophe between words or digits joins the pieces together. If '2026/27' should read '2026-27', put a space or hyphen in the title before converting.

Characters the converter cannot transliterate

Accent stripping covers every letter that Unicode decomposes into a base letter plus a mark, which is most of the Latin alphabet's accented forms. A handful of letters are characters in their own right with no base form, and those are mapped the way most CMS slug functions map them: ß to 'ss', ø to 'o', æ to 'ae', œ to 'oe', ł to 'l', đ and ð to 'd', þ to 'th'. So 'Straße in München' becomes 'strasse-in-munchen' and 'København Ørsted Łódź' becomes 'kobenhavn-orsted-lodz'.

Non-Latin scripts are removed entirely. A title in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese produces an empty slug, since none of its characters survive the a-to-z filter. Romanise the title yourself, then paste the romanised version.

Underscore separator details

Switching to Underscore (_) changes only the final joining step. Underscores already present in the input are still deleted in the filtering step, so 'my_file name' becomes 'myfile_name' rather than 'my_file_name'. If you need existing underscores preserved, replace them with spaces first. Hyphens in the input, by contrast, are kept as word boundaries in both modes.

What is deliberately left alone

• Stop words: 'the', 'a' and 'of' stay in the slug. Remove them from the title first if you want a shorter URL.
• Length: there is no cap, so a 20-word headline gives a 20-word slug. Most SEO advice favours 3 to 6 words.
• Numbers: digits are kept, which is usually what you want for years and model names.
• Ampersands: '&' is deleted rather than turned into 'and', so 'Tom & Jerry' loses the word.