URL slug generator

What a URL slug generator actually has to do

Turning a headline into a slug looks trivial until the headline contains a character that is not in ASCII. Most generators handle that by deleting what they do not recognise, which is why Södermalm comes back as sdermalm andStraße comes back as strae. The result is a URL that is unreadable, unsearchable, and impossible to guess.

The correct behaviour is to map each character to its closest ASCII equivalentbefore stripping anything. That is a different operation from stripping accents, because several characters are not accented letters at all —ß, ø, æ and đ are letters in their own right, and Unicode decomposition leaves them untouched.

The ü question

There is no single right answer, which is why this tool asks. German convention renders ü as ue, so Müller becomesmueller. Swedish convention drops the diaeresis entirely, so the same character becomes u. Pick the one that matches your content — a German site using the Swedish rule produces slugs that read as misspellings to its own audience.

The same split applies to ä and ö. Swedish maps them toa and o; German maps them to ae andoe.

Length, and where to cut

Long slugs are not penalised by search engines, but they are truncated in search results, wrapped awkwardly in messages, and painful to read aloud. If you cap the length, cut on a word boundary rather than mid-word — this tool moves the cut back to the last separator when doing so keeps most of the slug intact.

Batch mode

Paste an entire list of headlines, one per line, and every line is converted independently. Blank lines are skipped rather than producing empty slugs. This is the common case when migrating a site or planning a content calendar, and it is the reason the input is a text area rather than a single field.