Slugify

What the Slugify tool does

This tool turns any title or phrase into a clean, URL-safe “slug” — the readable identifier that sits in a web address, like my-first-post in example.com/blog/my-first-post. You paste text and it strips out punctuation, spaces and awkward characters, joining the remaining words with a separator of your choice (a hyphen or an underscore). Options let you force lowercase and, importantly for a multilingual audience, transliterate Cyrillic into Latin so that a Russian or Ukrainian headline becomes a pronounceable ASCII slug rather than vanishing. It runs live as you type. Reach for it whenever you need a stable identifier derived from human text: blog and article URLs, filenames, CSS classes or IDs, anchor links, database keys or image names — anywhere spaces and accents would otherwise cause trouble.

How it works technically

The pipeline runs in a fixed order. If transliteration is on, each Cyrillic letter is first mapped to its Latin equivalent through a lookup table — привет becomes privet, and multi-letter mappings such as ж → zh or щ → sch are expanded correctly, with capitalisation preserved. Next the string is Unicode-normalised with NFKD and the combining marks are stripped, which folds accented Latin letters down to their base form so café becomes cafe and Málaga becomes Malaga. Optional lowercasing follows. Finally every run of characters that is not a letter or digit is replaced by your separator, and leading, trailing and repeated separators are trimmed, so a messy Hello, World! collapses to a tidy hello-world. The result contains only a–z, 0–9 and the separator — safe in any URL without percent-encoding.

Concrete examples and use cases

• Blog URLs: My Awesome Blog Post! becomes my-awesome-blog-post.
• Cyrillic headlines: Привет мир becomes privet-mir with transliteration on.
• Accented names: Crème Brûlée becomes creme-brulee.
• Filenames and IDs: turn Q3 Report (final) into q3-report-final for a safe file or anchor name.

Practical tips and gotchas

A slug is only useful if it is stable, so decide on your separator and case once and keep them consistent across a site; hyphens are the conventional, SEO-friendly choice for URLs, while underscores are common for filenames and code identifiers. Transliteration covers the Russian and Ukrainian Cyrillic set, but scripts with no Latin mapping — Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and the like — have no obvious ASCII equivalent, so those characters are dropped rather than guessed; if a whole title is in such a script you may prefer to write the slug by hand. Watch out for two different titles collapsing to the same slug (for example C++ and C both reduce to c) — add a distinguishing word or number when that happens. And because the tool only outputs letters, digits and the separator, the result is always safe to drop straight into a link without further encoding.

Privacy: Slugify runs 100% locally in your browser. Your text is transliterated and cleaned entirely by JavaScript on your device — nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged, and no request leaves your machine, so unpublished titles stay private until you decide to ship them. If you generate slugs as part of a larger build or publishing pipeline, our API documentation shows how the s4m platform is meant to be scripted.