Slug Generator

What exactly does the generator do to my text?

In order: it removes apostrophes, replaces ß, æ, œ, ø, ł and đ with ss, ae, oe, o, l and d, strips accent marks from other letters, lowercases everything, turns every remaining character that is not a letter a–z or a digit into a space, and joins the words with your separator. Runs of spaces, dashes and punctuation collapse into a single separator, with none at the start or end.

Why does "Don’t" become "dont" and not "don-t"?

Apostrophes, straight or curly, are deleted before words are split, so contractions and possessives stay in one piece: "The Chef’s Guide" gives chefs-guide. Other punctuation is treated as a word break, which is why "C++ vs C# vs .NET" gives c-vs-c-vs-net: the symbols that distinguish those names are lost, so check slugs for programming languages and similar titles by hand.

What happens with Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic or emoji titles?

They are removed, because the tool only outputs the characters a–z and 0–9. A title written entirely in such characters returns a message saying nothing was left, and a mixed title keeps only its Latin letters and digits. Accented Latin letters are converted, so "Crème Brûlée" gives creme-brulee, but there is no transliteration of other scripts.

Which words does "Remove stop words" take out?

Exactly these: a, an, the, and, or, but, in, on, at, to, for, of, with, by, from, is, are, was, were, be, been, being, it, its, this, that, these and those. Note that this removes "to" and "for", so "How to Build a React App in 2024" becomes how-build-react-app-2024, which reads oddly. If every word in the title is a stop word the list is ignored and the full slug is kept.

Are hyphens really better than underscores?

Google’s URL guidance recommends hyphens to separate words and advises against underscores, so hyphens are the default. Underscores remain available because some systems and existing sites already use them. Changing the separator on live pages means changing URLs, which needs redirects.

Does it shorten long titles or check that the slug is unique?

No to both. It does not cut the slug to a length, so a long headline gives a long slug and the Length row shows how many characters you ended up with. It also cannot know which slugs already exist on your site, so two similar titles can produce the same slug and your CMS or router has to resolve that.

What is the URL example line for?

It simply places the slug after https://example.com/blog/ so you can see it in context. It is a placeholder, not a link to your site, and has no effect on the slug.