Text to URL Slug Converter

Convert any text to a URL-safe slug with Unicode transliteration, stop word removal, and separator options.

Tested tool guide Text and writing tools Checked August 16, 2026

What Text to URL Slug Converter does, with a checked example

Paste a headline, product name, or file title and get the version of it that belongs in a URL: lowercased, ASCII-only, punctuation stripped, words joined with hyphens. Non-Latin letters are transliterated first, so cafe becomes cafe and Munchen becomes munchen. The thing people most often misread is stop-word removal: with that option enabled, short function words like the, a, and in are dropped, so the slug contains fewer words than the text you pasted. Both the separator and the stop-word list can be turned off, and the result is safe to drop into a link path as-is.

Worked example

A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.

Input

The 3 Best Cafés in München - 2026 Guide!

Expected output

3-best-cafes-munchen-2026-guide

Accented letters are transliterated first (Cafés to cafes, München to munchen), punctuation like the dash and exclamation mark is stripped, and with stop-word removal enabled the and in are dropped. The remaining words are lowercased and joined with the default hyphen separator.

How the result is produced

Transliteration and normalization

Accented Latin letters are mapped to their ASCII equivalents first: n to n, u to u, e to e, and so on. The text is then lowercased, and punctuation, dashes, quotes, and symbols are removed. Characters that have no Latin mapping, such as CJK ideographs, are dropped rather than left as percent-encoded bytes, so a slug is always plain ASCII and safe in any URL context.

Stop words and separators

With stop-word removal on, common function words from a fixed list - the, a, an, and, of, in, to - are removed before joining, which shortens slugs at the cost of losing those words. The separator is selectable, with hyphen as the default; other choices such as underscore are available. Any run of spaces, tabs, or punctuation between words collapses to a single separator, so the output never contains double hyphens.

Good uses

Publishing to a CMS or static-site generator: paste the article title and copy the result into the slug or permalink field so the URL is short and readable.
Creating ASCII-only export filenames or directory names from product and article titles when spaces and accents would break the downstream tool.
Cleaning messy source text - titles with dashes, quotes, accents, and stray whitespace - into one consistent identifier for links, anchors, or tests.

Limits and checks

Empty results are possible: input that is only stop words, symbols, or untransliterable scripts can produce an empty slug, and the tool returns it without warning. Look at the result before copying it into a URL.
Slugging is lossy and irreversible: accents, case, and punctuation are gone, and different inputs collide - Cafe Menu and cafe menu both become cafe-menu. The original text cannot be recovered from the slug.
No uniqueness checking: two identical titles yield two identical slugs, and the tool never appends counters or consults existing URLs. Deduplicate where the slug is used, typically by appending a number.

Common questions

Why is the word 'the' missing from my slug?

Stop-word removal is on by default: short function words from a fixed list - the, a, an, and, of, in, to - are dropped to keep slugs compact. Toggle the option off if every word must appear. The removal applies to the whole input, so a phrase made mostly of stop words can come out almost empty.

What happens to accented text, and to non-Latin scripts like Chinese?

Accented Latin letters transliterate to plain ASCII, so cafe, naive, and Munchen slug cleanly. Characters with no Latin equivalent have nothing to map to and are dropped, so a title in Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic can yield an empty or very short slug. For those, keep the original text as your identifier or use a manual, Romanized version.

References and verification

The example and behavioral notes were checked against the browser implementation. Standards and primary references below define the relevant format, formula, or platform behavior.