URL Slug Generator
Convert any text into a URL-safe slug (kebab-case) made only of lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens. Includes an optional simplified Japanese romanization mode for hiragana and katakana.
Conversion examples
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Hello World! | hello-world |
| café | cafe |
| ___multiple---spaces here___ | multiple-spaces-here |
| がっこう (Romanize Japanese (hiragana/katakana)) | gakkou |
What Is a URL Slug?
A URL slug is the short, clean identifier that appears in the address bar as part of a page's URL — usually the last segment, like "url-slug-generator" in "toolbase.cc/dev/text/slug". Blog post titles, product names, and page headings are written for humans and often contain spaces, punctuation, mixed case, and accented characters, none of which make for a tidy, shareable link. This tool takes any text you paste in and rewrites it into kebab-case: every character is lowercased, accented letters are reduced to their plain ASCII form (so "café" becomes "cafe"), and anything that isn't a lowercase letter or digit — spaces, punctuation, underscores, emoji — is collapsed down into a single hyphen, with no stray hyphens left at the start or end.
It also understands Japanese input. Flip on the "Romanize Japanese" checkbox and hiragana and katakana are converted to simplified romaji before the slug is built, so a heading like "こんにちは" becomes a usable Latin-alphabet string instead of being discarded outright. Kanji is treated differently on purpose: because a single kanji character can have several valid readings depending on context, there's no reliable way to romanize it automatically, so the tool strips kanji rather than risk generating a confidently wrong reading. Every bit of this processing — the accent stripping, the hyphen collapsing, the Japanese romanization — runs locally in your browser with plain JavaScript, and the text you type never leaves your device or touches toolbase.cc's servers.
How to Use the URL Slug Generator
- Paste in the text you want to convert Drop an article title, product name, or any other heading into the input box — English, Japanese, or a mix of both works fine.
- Turn on romanization for Japanese text If your text contains hiragana or katakana, check "Romanize Japanese" so those characters are converted to romaji instead of being dropped.
- Check the generated slug The kebab-case result updates instantly below the input as you type, so you can see the effect of every change right away.
- Touch up the result by hand if needed Kanji is removed rather than guessed at, so re-read the output and add back any words that got lost in translation.
- Copy the slug into your CMS or codebase Use the Copy button to send the final string to your clipboard, ready to paste into a permalink field, filename, or class name.
Tips for getting more out of it
- The generated slug only contains lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens, so it's safe to reuse directly in URL paths, filenames, and CSS class names.
- Kanji can't be romanized automatically and gets stripped out during conversion. If you're slugifying a Japanese heading, turn on "Romanize Japanese" first and adjust the result by hand afterward if needed.
- Kana used as particles, like は and へ, are romanized by their plain reading (ha/he) regardless of context, which is why こんにちは becomes "konnichiha" instead of "konnichiwa" — edit the output manually if that matters for your use case.
- Runs of symbols, spaces, and underscores collapse into a single hyphen, and any leading or trailing hyphens are removed automatically.
- Use the Copy button to grab the result straight to your clipboard for pasting into a CMS or spreadsheet.
Where a URL Slug Generator Comes In Handy
Cleaning up blog and CMS permalinks
Most blogging platforms auto-generate a slug from your post title, but the result is often clunky or overly long — run the title through this tool first to get a tighter, more readable permalink before you publish.
Building product page URLs for e-commerce
Product names frequently include symbols, sizes, or brand punctuation that break cleanly formatted URLs; converting the name to a slug keeps product page paths short and search-engine friendly.
Normalizing filenames and image names
Uploaded files with spaces, accented characters, or full-width punctuation in their names can cause problems on some servers and CDNs, so slugifying the filename first keeps everything predictable.
Generating CSS class names and HTML element IDs
Turning a heading into an anchor link or a CSS class name requires a string made only of safe characters, and this tool produces exactly that in one step.
Standardizing URLs across a multilingual site
If a page has a Japanese heading but you want an English-style URL for consistency across locales, the romanization option gives you a readable draft slug to start from.
Glossary
- Slug
- The short string that identifies a specific piece of content — an article, product, or page — within a URL. The term comes from newspaper and publishing terminology for a short internal label, and it's now the literal field name for this concept in CMS platforms like WordPress.
- Kebab-case
- A naming style where words are joined by hyphens, like "my-blog-post". The name comes from the visual resemblance to food skewered on a kebab stick, and it's the de facto standard format for URL slugs.
- Snake_case
- A naming style where words are joined by underscores instead of hyphens, like "my_blog_post". It's common in programming variable names, but Google has indicated it treats underscores as joining characters rather than word separators, making it a weaker choice for URLs than kebab-case.
- Permalink
- The permanent, stable URL assigned to a piece of content. CMS platforms let you configure a permalink structure for the whole site, and the slug is the variable part that gets slotted into that structure for each individual page.
- Romanization
- The process of converting non-Latin script, in this case Japanese hiragana and katakana, into the Latin alphabet based on pronunciation. This tool applies a simplified set of romanization rules and deliberately leaves kanji untouched since it can't determine the correct reading without full sentence context.
- NFKD normalization
- A Unicode normalization form that decomposes a single accented character, such as "é", into its base letter ("e") plus a separate combining accent mark. This tool relies on that decomposition to strip accents cleanly and reduce text to plain ASCII.
Frequently Asked Questions
Side Note — Slugs and the kebab-case debate
The word "slug" comes from newspaper and publishing jargon, where it referred to a short identifying label attached to an article before it went to print. On the web, it came to mean a short, clean identifier derived from a human-readable string, like an article title, that can be safely used as part of a URL. Many content management systems, including WordPress, use "slug" as the literal field name in their admin screens, so it's a term many site owners have encountered firsthand.
There has long been a debate over whether URL slugs should use hyphens (kebab-case) or underscores (snake_case) as word separators. Google has publicly stated that hyphens are treated as word boundaries while underscores are treated as joining characters, meaning "my-blog-post" tends to be parsed as three separate words while "my_blog_post" tends to be parsed as one single word. That distinction is a big reason most SEO-conscious sites standardize on kebab-case.
Converting Japanese text into a URL meant for an English-speaking audience is harder than a simple character swap. Hiragana and katakana are phonetic scripts, so they can be mechanically romanized, but kanji characters often have multiple valid readings depending on context (today's "今日" can be read as "kyou" or "konnichi", for instance), so there's no way to pick the correct one without understanding the sentence. That's why this tool deliberately strips kanji instead of guessing at a romanization — a wrong guess is worse than an honest gap the user can fill in by hand.