URL slug generator

What a URL slug generator actually has to do

Turning a headline into a slug looks trivial until the headline contains a character that is not in ASCII. Most generators handle that by deleting what they do not recognize, which is why Södermalm comes back as sdermalm and Straße comes back as strae. The result is a URL that is unreadable, unsearchable, and impossible to guess.

For recognized Latin-script letters, the useful behavior is to map each letter to its closest ASCII equivalent before stripping anything. That is a different operation from stripping accents, because several characters are not accented letters at all — ß, ø, æ and đ are letters in their own right, and Unicode decomposition leaves them untouched.

Text copied from a PDF or page layout can also carry invisible formatting marks inside a word. They are removed here instead of becoming visible hyphens. If a source still behaves unexpectedly, the invisible character detector shows exactly which hidden code points it contains.

Greek, Cyrillic, Han and kana remain in Unicode. Those scripts have no single language-neutral Latin transliteration, so guessing would change names and words rather than clean them. Unicode paths are valid, but their non-ASCII characters are percent-encoded in transport: /södermalm travels as /s%C3%B6dermalm. If you have been handed an encoded address and want to see what it says, URL decode turns it back.

The headline itself usually needs a decision before it gets here, since a slug is normally made at the same moment as the display title. Capitalization is its own argument with its own rules, and title case settles it separately — the slug is lowercased either way, so the two choices genuinely do not interfere. What a slug is, and why the URL keeps mattering after the headline changes, is covered in what a URL slug is.

The ü question

There is no single right answer, which is why this tool asks. German convention renders ü as ue, so Müller becomes mueller. Swedish convention drops the diaeresis entirely, so the same character becomes u. Pick the one that matches your content — a German site using the Swedish rule produces slugs that read as misspellings to its own audience.

The same split applies to ä and ö. Swedish maps them to a and o; German maps them to ae and oe.

Length, and where to cut

Long slugs are not penalized by search engines, but they are truncated in search results, wrapped awkwardly in messages, and painful to read aloud. If you cap the length, cut on a word boundary rather than mid-word — this tool moves the cut back to the last separator when doing so keeps most of the slug intact.

Batch mode

Paste an entire list of headlines, one per line, and every line is converted independently. Blank lines and lines with no letters or digits are skipped rather than producing empty slugs, and the receipt reports how many nonblank lines were skipped. This is the common case when migrating a site or planning a content calendar, and it is the reason the input is a text area rather than a single field. Downloaded lists use LF line endings and finish with one newline.

A domain name is a different layer of the address. When the job is to combine several lists of brand words, add prefixes or suffixes, and check the resulting domain endings, use the domain name finder. This page deliberately turns one finished title into a path; it does not query a registry or invent a brand.