Text to Slug

How it actually works

The conversion is a defined pipeline: lower-case when that option is on, drop every character outside the ASCII word set while keeping spaces and hyphens, trim, then replace runs of whitespace with your separator and collapse repeated separators so nothing ends up as a double dash. A maximum length cuts the slug at that point and removes a trailing separator, so a truncated slug does not end on a dash.

Output updates as you type, and three counts sit beside it - the original length, the word count and the final slug length - which is the information you actually need when a CMS limits a URL field.

Separator choice is dash or underscore, because those are the two conventions worth supporting; the lowercase toggle exists for the rare case where case must be preserved.

What that means for your results

Dash is the right default for public URLs: search engines treat it as a word boundary, while an underscore is read as joining words into one token. Keeping the option anyway is deliberate, since file names and database keys often want the opposite.

The output is a genuine ASCII slug with no percent-encoding surprises, so it can go straight into a path segment without a second pass through URL Encoder/Decoder.

Where it falls short — honestly

The word-character class is ASCII only, so accented and non-Latin letters are deleted rather than transliterated: a title with e-acute loses the accent mark entirely and Arabic or Chinese text is stripped to nothing. Languages that need folded characters require a transliteration step this tool does not fake.

It will not know which words to drop: no stop-word list, no plural handling, no semantic shortening. A long sentence produces a long slug unless you set a length or edit it yourself.

A real end-to-end workflow

Paste a headline, set the length your URL schema prefers, and copy the result. The character counts tell you immediately whether the slug still says enough to be useful.

For an existing list of titles, run them one at a time and keep the outputs in a spreadsheet, then use Case Converter if a stray uppercase survived elsewhere. To measure the finished page instead of the address, use Meta Tag Generator and Keyword Density.