Slug generator — offline

A slug is the human-readable part of a URL, and getting it right is worth a moment: it is visible in search results, it is what people see when a link is pasted into a message, and it is effectively permanent once published, because changing it breaks every existing link.

Type or paste a title and the slug appears — lowercased, punctuation stripped, spaces replaced by your chosen separator. It is a few string operations running in your browser, with nothing transmitted anywhere, which also means it works offline while you are drafting.

This is where naive slug generators fail. Faced with Crème brûlée, many simply drop the characters they do not recognise and produce crme-brle — or percent-encode them into an unreadable mess of %C3%A8 sequences.

Accented characters are transliterated to their base letters here, so Crème brûlée becomes creme-brulee and Romanian, Polish, German, and French titles all produce clean ASCII slugs that stay readable. Pure ASCII matters because it survives copy-paste, email clients, analytics tools, and older systems without being re-encoded into noise.

Use hyphens for URLs. Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so my_blog_post can be read as one token while my-blog-post is read as three words. Underscores are a reasonable choice for file names, which is why both are offered.

A few habits worth keeping: prefer short and descriptive over the full title, since a slug carrying five words beats one carrying fifteen; drop filler words that add nothing; leave dates out unless the content is genuinely time-bound, because they age the URL; and once a page is published, do not change the slug without setting up a redirect.

Related and equally local: case converter for identifiers rather than URLs, and URL encoder for percent-encoding query values.