Text Slugify (URL)
A professional text slugify tool that normalizes text into URL-friendly slugs, supporting lowercase conversion, custom separators, and English stopword removal. Uses Unicode normalization to handle most language characters, ensuring generated slugs follow SEO best practices. Ideal for blog post URLs, file naming, database identifiers, and other scenarios. Fully processed locally to protect your privacy—no registration required. Provides detailed usage guidelines and best practice recommendations to help you generate high-quality slugs.
Why Use Slugify?
🔍 SEO Optimization
Keywords in URLs help search engines understand page content and improve rankings. For example, example.com/blog/how-to-learn-javascript is more effective than example.com/blog/123.
👁️ Readability & Sharing
Users can instantly understand the content from the URL. Slugs are more shareable on social media and easier to remember or type manually.
💻 System Compatibility
Avoid errors caused by special characters in filenames or URLs. Ensures cross-platform compatibility (Windows/Linux/macOS) and prevents encoding issues.
🗄️ Database-Friendly
Use as unique identifiers (e.g., usernames, tags) to reduce SQL injection risks and improve indexing and query performance.
What is Slugify?
A slug is a shortened, standardized version of text used as a URL, filename, or identifier. Common processing includes standardizing case, removing punctuation, and joining words with separators.
- ASCII Priority: Remove accents and symbols, keep only alphanumeric characters and spaces
- Unicode Compatible: Normalize most language characters using NFKD before processing
- URL-Safe: Output contains only letters, numbers, and separators—ready for direct use in paths
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How are Chinese characters handled?
A: By default, diacritics are removed and pinyin letters are retained. Pure Chinese text may become empty; it's recommended to manually convert to pinyin before slugifying, or use a Chinese pinyin conversion tool.
Q: Why is my result empty?
A: Your input may consist entirely of punctuation, symbols, or spaces, or all words may have been removed by stopword filtering. Try disabling the stopword option or adjusting your input.
Q: Should I use - or _ as the separator?
A: For SEO, use - (hyphen), as Google treats it as a space; _ (underscore) is treated as a concatenation symbol, which hinders word separation. For filenames, either is acceptable.
Q: Is there a length limit for slugs?
A: There's no technical limit, but it's recommended to keep slugs under 50 characters for better URL display and SEO. Excessively long slugs may be truncated by search engines.
Best Practices
Recommended Practices
- ✓ Keep it short (recommended < 50 characters)
- ✓ Avoid special characters; use only letters, numbers, and separators
- ✓ Use lowercase to avoid case-sensitivity issues
- ✓ Remove stopwords to improve semantic density
Avoid These Practices
- ✗ Do not include sensitive information (e.g., IDs, emails, passwords)
- ✗ Do not use special characters (e.g., @#$%^&*)
- ✗ Do not retain spaces or consecutive separators
- ✗ Do not repeat the same word
Technical Details
Uses NFKD decomposition + removal of combining diacritics (\p{M}), converting Café to Cafe. Supports most Latin-based characters.
Based on common English words (a/an/the/and/or/of/to/in/on/for/at/by/with); customizable. Chinese stopwords require separate handling.
Requires ES6+ and Unicode regex support (\p{...}). Supported in modern browsers: Chrome 64+, Firefox 78+, Safari 11.1+.
How to Generate a Slug Through a Programming Language?
JavaScript
function slugify(text) {
return text
.toLowerCase()
.normalize("NFKD")
.replace(/[\u0300-\u036f]/g, "")
.replace(/[^\w\s-]/g, "")
.trim()
.replace(/[\s_-]+/g, "-")
.replace(/^-+|-+$/g, "");
}PHP
function slugify($text) {
$text = mb_strtolower($text);
$text = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $text);
$text = preg_replace("/[^\w\s-]/", "", $text);
$text = preg_replace("/[\s_-]+/", "-", $text);
return trim($text, "-");
}Python
import re
import unicodedata
def slugify(text):
text = text.lower()
text = unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", text)
text = text.encode("ascii", "ignore").decode("ascii")
text = re.sub(r"[^\w\s-]", "", text)
text = re.sub(r"[\s_-]+", "-", text)
return text.strip("-")Go
import (
"regexp"
"strings"
"golang.org/x/text/unicode/norm"
)
func Slugify(text string) string {
text = strings.ToLower(text)
text = norm.NFKD.String(text)
re := regexp.MustCompile(`[^\w\s-]`)
text = re.ReplaceAllString(text, "")
re = regexp.MustCompile(`[\s_-]+`)
text = re.ReplaceAllString(text, "-")
return strings.Trim(text, "-")
}Ruby
require "unicode"
def slugify(text)
text = text.downcase
text = Unicode.nfkd(text).gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F]/, "")
text = text.gsub(/[^\w\s-]/, "")
text = text.gsub(/[\s_-]+/, "-")
text.strip.gsub(/^-+|-+$/, "")
endJava
import java.text.Normalizer;
public static String slugify(String text) {
text = text.toLowerCase();
text = Normalizer.normalize(text, Normalizer.Form.NFKD);
text = text.replaceAll("[^\\w\\s-]", "");
text = text.replaceAll("[\\s_-]+", "-");
return text.replaceAll("^-+|-+$", "");
}