Convert text to a URL slug lowercase, hyphens, no diacritics Free Online Secure

Why you convert text to a URL slug

Every page on the web has an address, and the last piece of that address is usually a few words: how-to-repot-a-fern, annual-report-2026, contact-us. That piece is the slug. It is the human-readable tail of a URL, the part that tells a reader and a search engine what the page is about before the page has even loaded. When you publish an article, a product, a category or a file, somebody has to turn its proper title into that tail. To convert text to a URL slug is to take a title as a person writes it, with capitals, spaces, commas and accents, and reduce it to lowercase words joined by hyphens that any server, browser and link checker will accept without complaint.

Paste a title and read it back as a slug. The conversion runs in your browser, nothing you type is sent anywhere, and you can copy the result with one click. Below you will find exactly what the page does to a line and what it leaves alone, how it treats accented letters and the letters of other alphabets, which results to double-check by hand, where a slug matters and where it does not, and the traps that catch people who convert text to a URL slug in a hurry.

What the conversion does

Lowercase, strip the marks, hyphenate

The page works in three moves. It lowercases the line. It takes the accents and other marks off Latin letters, so é becomes e and ü becomes u. Then it replaces everything that is not a letter or a digit with a hyphen and squeezes repeated hyphens into one. The line Crème Brûlée for 2 — Straße 17, fooBar comes back as creme-brulee-for-2-strasse-17-foobar. The comma, the dash and the spaces have all become single hyphens, the accents are gone, the ß has become ss, and the digits stayed where they were.

Hyphens never pile up and never sit at the ends

A title such as Hello, World! ends in punctuation, and a naive replacement would leave a hyphen dangling at the end. The page trims hyphens from both ends and collapses runs of them, so the result is hello-world and not hello-world- or hello--world. This matters more than it looks: a trailing hyphen makes an address look sloppy, and a double hyphen can break a link when somebody copies it into a message.

Copying the result

A button next to the result copies it to the clipboard. Paste it into the slug field of your publishing system, into a file name, or into the end of an address you are building by hand.

What the conversion does not do

It does not transliterate other alphabets

Marks come off Latin letters only. A title in Japanese, Arabic, Greek or Hindi keeps its own letters, because the page does not guess a Latin spelling for them. Transliteration depends on a convention that differs by language and by publisher, and a wrong guess produces a slug that looks plausible and reads wrongly. Letters from those alphabets count as letters, so they stay, and the browser percent-encodes them when they appear in an address. If your site wants Latin-only addresses for such titles, write the transliteration yourself and then convert the transliterated line.

It does not strip every mark in every alphabet

Some letters outside the Latin alphabet carry marks that belong to the letter itself. The Russian й and the Ukrainian ї are examples: the mark is part of how the letter is written, so the page leaves them as they are. The same logic applies to letters such as the Hindi vowel signs. Only the accents that sit on Latin letters are removed.

It does not shorten the result

A long title gives a long slug. The page does not drop small words such as the, of or and, and it does not cut at a fixed length. If you want a shorter address, shorten the title first. A slug of four to six meaningful words reads better in a search result than a slug that repeats an entire headline.

It does not check that the slug is free

Two different articles can give the same slug. Your publishing system is the only place that knows which slugs are already taken, so look there before you commit to one.

Letters that need a second look

The German ß and umlauts

The sharp s becomes ss, so Straße gives strasse. The umlauts lose their dots, so Müller gives muller. Some German publishers prefer mueller, which keeps the pronunciation. If your readers search for the spelling with an e, write the title that way before you convert.

Scandinavian and Polish letters

The slashed o becomes a plain o, so Ørsted gives orsted, and the Polish ł becomes l, so Łódź gives lodz. Å and ä lose their marks and become a. These are the results most people expect, but a name with local pride attached may deserve a different treatment by hand.

Turkish dotted and dotless i

Lowercasing follows the language of the page. In Turkish, İ lowercases to i and I lowercases to ı, which then stays a letter of its own. A converter that applies English rules would turn every capital I into i and change the word. This page follows the language it is written in.

Romanian, French and Spanish accents

The letters ă, â, î, ș and ț become a, a, i, s and t. In French, é, è, ê and ç give e and c. In Spanish, ñ gives n, which is where a slug can change meaning: año, a year, and ano, which is something else, collapse to the same string. Keep that in mind when a headline plays on the difference.

Vietnamese stacked marks

Vietnamese letters can carry two marks at once. Both come off, and đ becomes d, so Hà Nội gives ha-noi. The result is readable to a Vietnamese speaker, though the tones are lost.

Why slugs look the way they do

Lowercase because addresses can be case-sensitive

The path part of an address is case-sensitive on many servers. /About and /about can be two different pages or one page and one error. Writing every slug in lowercase removes the question. Search engines also treat the two as separate addresses, so mixing cases can split a page into two copies.

Hyphens because they read as spaces

Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a joiner. A slug with hyphens is read as separate words, which is what you want for ranking on those words. That is why web addresses prefer kebab-case and why the underscore form, snake_case, belongs in code and databases rather than in addresses.

No special characters because they must be encoded

Spaces, commas, question marks, ampersands and slashes all have a meaning inside an address. A question mark starts the query string; a slash starts a new level of the path. A character with a meaning of its own has to be percent-encoded when it is used as plain text, and a slug full of %20 and %C3%A9 is ugly and easy to break. Keeping to letters, digits and hyphens avoids the whole question.

No accents because not every tool copes

Modern browsers show an accented address fine, but the same address may arrive as a string of percent signs in an email, a chat message or a printed report. Plain letters survive every journey. This is the strongest argument for removing marks from Latin letters, and it explains why almost every publishing system does so by default.

Where a clean slug matters

Blog posts and articles

For a blog, to convert text to a URL slug is part of every publishing routine. A post slug is read by people before they click: in a search result, a shared link, a browser tab. A slug that matches the title is easy to trust. One that is a string of numbers tells the reader nothing. Many content systems build the slug automatically from the title, but the automatic version can be too long or can carry a date that makes an evergreen article look old, so editing it by hand is common.

Product and category pages

Shops need slugs for thousands of items, so they convert text to a URL slug again and again. A consistent rule, such as brand, product name and size in that order, keeps the catalogue tidy and makes addresses predictable. Convert each product line with the same page, the one that lets you convert text to a URL slug in a single step, and the pattern holds without effort.

File names for downloads

A file called Final Report (v2) copy.pdf will cause trouble in an address. A file called final-report-v2.pdf will not. If you publish downloads, the slug rule is also a good file-name rule. For documents that need to change form on the way, a converter such as HTML to PDF keeps the name and the content under your control.

Anchors and in-page links

The part of an address after the hash sign points at a place inside a page. Headings are often turned into anchor ids by the same rule: lowercase, hyphens, no marks. If you write the table of contents of a long document by hand, converting each heading to a slug gives you ids that match what a generator would produce.

Git branches and identifiers

Branch names, issue labels and folder names face the same restrictions as addresses. A feature called Add user login becomes add-user-login. For code identifiers that need capitals instead of hyphens, camelCase is the sibling form.

How to convert text to a URL slug here

Paste or type the title

To convert text to a URL slug, enter the title in the first field. The slug appears in the second as you type, so you can watch each punctuation mark disappear.

Read what changed

Look at where the hyphens landed and check that every word survived. If a word is missing, it was probably made of letters the page keeps unchanged, or it was separated by a character that became a hyphen. Both are quick to spot by eye.

Copy it into place

Press the copy button and paste the slug where you need it. If your publishing system also lowercases and cleans slugs, the result will pass through unchanged, which is a good sign that the two agree.

The same line in the other six forms

One table for comparison

Below the converter, a table shows the example line in all seven forms the site offers: uppercase, lowercase, Title Case, snake_case, kebab-case, camelCase and the URL slug. Comparing them side by side is the quickest way to see which one belongs where. If you only want the words small and nothing else changed, lowercase is the plain choice; for a heading that a person will read, Title Case is the one to use.

Where slugs come from

A word from the newsroom

The word slug is older than the web, and so is the habit of having to convert text to a URL slug by hand, which printers did with a pencil. In a print newsroom, a slug was a short label attached to a story while it moved through the building, a few words that told editors and typesetters which story was which. Content management systems borrowed the name when they needed a short label for each page. The job is the same: a few plain words that identify one item without ambiguity.

From query strings to readable paths

Early dynamic sites used addresses such as page.php?id=4731. They worked, but nobody could read them. Readable paths followed when it became clear that people judge a link before clicking it and that search engines weigh the words in it. Today almost every publishing tool generates a slug, and knowing how the rules work helps you spot the result that needs fixing.

The slug in your wider workflow

From a spreadsheet of titles to a list of addresses

A site migration often starts with a spreadsheet: a column of titles and a column of old addresses. The new addresses come from the titles. Convert each title with the same rule and the new column is consistent from the first row to the last. When the sheet needs to leave as data for another system, CSV to JSON turns the rows into records, and JSON to CSV brings them back for checking.

Planning redirects

When you convert text to a URL slug for a page that already exists, remember that if the page changes its slug, the old address should redirect to the new one, or every inbound link breaks. Converting both the old and the new title and putting the two slugs side by side gives you the redirect list with no guesswork. Keep the list: redirects are cheap to keep and expensive to lose.

Keeping design and addresses aligned

Naming matters across the whole project. The component called Primary Button in the design file, the class primary-button in the stylesheet and the page /buttons/primary-button all describe the same thing. When the names follow one rule, searching across tools finds everything. For the measurements that come with those components, px to rem converts the sizes while the names stay consistent.

Writing titles that make good slugs

Put the main words first

A slug is read from left to right, and the first words carry the most weight. Start the title with the subject, not with a filler such as a, the or how. A title that opens with the subject gives a slug that opens with the subject.

Keep it short

Before you convert text to a URL slug, trim the title. Four to six words is a good target. Long slugs are cut off in search results and are awkward in print. If a title is long, write a shorter version for the slug and convert that line instead.

Avoid dates unless the content is dated

A year in a slug ages the page. For news, a date makes sense. For a guide that you plan to keep up to date, leave it out, and the address stays valid when the content is refreshed.

Do not stuff keywords

When you convert text to a URL slug, resist the urge to pack in terms. A slug repeating the same word three times looks like spam and gains nothing. Say it once, clearly.

Pick a rule and stay with it

Whenever you convert text to a URL slug, use the same page and the same habits. Whatever the rule is, apply it everywhere. Consistent addresses are easier to link to, to redirect, to analyse and to remember.

Traps when you convert text to a URL slug

An empty result

A title made entirely of letters the page leaves in place, or of characters that all become hyphens, can come back empty or oddly short. If the result is blank, the input had nothing the page recognises as a Latin letter or digit. Provide a Latin-letter version of the title.

Different titles, same slug

Résumé and Resume give the same slug, as do Año and Ano. Your publishing system will usually add a number to the second one, which makes the address less meaningful. Notice when it happens and rephrase the title if the two matter.

Changing a published slug

A slug is part of a promise to everyone who has linked to the page. Changing it without a redirect breaks that promise. Decide the slug before you publish, and if you must change it later, add the redirect the same day.

Slugs that contain private information

Names, email addresses and order numbers inside an address end up in server logs, browser history and shared links. If a title contains something private, do not turn it into a slug as it is.

Assuming the page and the server agree

Your publishing system may apply its own rules on top of any slug you paste. Check the final address after saving. If it differs from what you expect, the system has a rule you should know about.

Questions before you convert

What happens to numbers?

They stay, as part of the word they were next to or as separate words between hyphens.

Are capital letters kept?

No. Everything is lowercased, following the language of the page.

Is the slug the same as the whole address?

No. The slug is the last piece of the path. The domain and any folder before it are decided by your site.

Can I use underscores instead of hyphens?

You can, but for addresses hyphens are the standard, because search engines read them as spaces. For code, see snake_case.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. The conversion happens in your browser. A draft title, a client name or an unreleased product is as private here as in a text editor.

What if my language has no Latin letters?

The letters stay, and browsers encode them in the address. Many sites keep such addresses as they are, because modern browsers display them correctly. If you need a Latin version, write it yourself and convert that.

A worked example

Suppose you run a small bakery site and you are publishing three pages: Crème Brûlée for Two, Sourdough Starter: Notes for Beginners, and Müsli & Granola — 2026 Prices. You paste them one at a time. The first gives creme-brulee-for-two. The second gives sourdough-starter-notes-for-beginners, and you decide that is too long, so you shorten the title to Sourdough Starter Basics and convert again to get sourdough-starter-basics. The third gives musli-granola-2026-prices; you drop the year, because the page will be updated, and settle on musli-granola-prices. Three slugs, all lowercase, all hyphenated, none with a mark or a symbol. The whole exercise took a minute, and the decision that mattered, dropping the year, was yours, not the page's.

A short checklist

Before converting

Write the title in plain words. Put the subject first. Remove dates you do not need. Decide whether a shorter version would serve better.

While converting

Watch the hyphens. Make sure no word vanished, and look at how accented and special letters were handled.

After converting

Check that the slug is not already taken, that it reads sensibly out loud, and that the final address in your system matches. If you change a published slug, add a redirect.

Your text stays on your device

The conversion happens locally. Your browser handles the text, and nothing is uploaded, stored or sent. There is no account to create and nothing to delete afterwards. It is the simple way to convert text to a URL slug without handing a draft title to a stranger.

In short

To convert text to a URL slug here, paste a title and read it back lowercased, with the marks taken off Latin letters, every other character replaced by a hyphen and repeated hyphens squeezed into one. The page does not transliterate Japanese, Arabic or Greek, does not strip marks that are part of letters such as the Russian й, and does not shorten or check for duplicates, so those decisions stay with you. Letters like ß, ø and ł become ss, o and l, and the lowercase follows the language of the page, so a Turkish İ is handled as Turkish. Nothing is uploaded.