Slug Generator

A URL slug is the human-readable path segment that identifies a page within a website. In the URL https://example.com/blog/getting-started-with-rust, the slug is 'getting-started-with-rust'. Good slugs are all lowercase, use hyphens as word separators, contain only alphanumeric characters and hyphens, and are concise but descriptive. They are derived from page titles but optimized for URLs.

Slugs matter for search engine optimization. Search engines use the words in a URL slug as ranking signals for the page's content. Including the target keyword in the slug is an established SEO best practice. Slugs should omit stop words (articles, prepositions) that add length without keyword value. Very long slugs dilute keyword relevance and look cluttered; aim for slugs with 3–5 meaningful words.

Generating a valid slug from arbitrary user input requires several steps: normalize Unicode characters (NFC normalization), transliterate non-ASCII characters to ASCII equivalents (e.g., é to e, ü to u), convert to lowercase, replace any remaining non-alphanumeric character with a hyphen, collapse consecutive hyphens into one, and trim leading and trailing hyphens. For CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) text, which has no spaces and where ASCII transliteration is not straightforward, a different strategy (such as using Pinyin romanization for Chinese) may be needed.