Slug Generator

A slug is the human-readable segment at the end of a URL path, such as "hello-world" in /blog/hello-world/. Good slugs use only lowercase letters, digits, and a single separator character so they survive copy-paste, email clients, and search-engine indexing without percent-encoding.

This generator intentionally produces ASCII-only slugs, so it drops characters without a configured transliteration. Unicode path segments are valid and browsers can percent-encode them; they are not broken. Use a Unicode-aware slug system when preserving CJK or other scripts is a requirement.

The generator runs two passes. First, a manual swap table handles characters Unicode cannot decompose: sharp-s becomes "ss", the ae and oe ligatures expand to "ae" and "oe", and Nordic letters like thorn and eth map to "th" and "d". Then NFKD normalization strips combining accents, so "cafe" with an acute accent on the e becomes plain "cafe". German umlauts (a, o, u with umlaut) are handled by NFKD alone, reducing to the bare vowel (matching the common English convention for borrowed words like "uber").

After all cleaning steps, the slug is trimmed to the cap you set (default 100 characters). The generator backs off to the last separator within the slice to avoid cutting a word in half. For example, a 13-character cap on "the-quick-brown-fox" gives "the-quick" instead of the mid-word "the-quick-bro". If no separator falls within the slice at all, it falls back to a hard cut at the limit.

The generator removes 13 common English function words: a, an, the, and, or, of, to, in, for, on, at, by, with. This option is off by default. Turn it on to shorten blog post slugs ("the-best-guide-to-seo" becomes "best-guide-seo"), but leave it off if your slug must match an existing URL exactly.