How to Slugify Text in JavaScript, Python, and PHP

Slugifying text—converting a human-readable string into a URL-safe slug—is a common task in web development. Whether you’re building a blog, e-commerce site, or API, you’ll need to generate clean URL slugs from titles and other text. This guide shows you how to do it in the three most popular server-side languages.

Don’t want to write code? Use our Slugify Online tool to convert text to slugs instantly in your browser.

JavaScript / Node.js

Using the slugify Library

The most popular approach in JavaScript is the slugify npm package:

npm install slugify

const slugify = require('slugify');

const title = "Café Menu — Special Édition!";
const slug = slugify(title, {
  lower: true,
  strict: true,
  trim: true
});

console.log(slug);
// Output: cafe-menu-special-edition

Options explained:

• lower: true— converts to lowercase
• strict: true— strips all characters that aren’t letters, numbers, or the separator
• trim: true— removes leading/trailing separators

Manual Implementation

If you prefer not to add a dependency, here’s a minimal slugify function:

function slugify(text) {
  return text
    .normalize('NFKD')
    .replace(/[\u0300-\u036f]/g, '')
    .toLowerCase()
    .trim()
    .replace(/[^a-z0-9\s-]/g, '')
    .replace(/[\s_]+/g, '-')
    .replace(/-+/g, '-')
    .replace(/^-|-$/g, '');
}

This handles accented characters via Unicode normalization, converts to lowercase, removes special characters, and collapses whitespace into single hyphens.

Python

Using python-slugify

The standard library for Python slugification is python-slugify:

pip install python-slugify

from slugify import slugify

title = "Café Menu — Special Édition!"
slug = slugify(title)

print(slug)
# Output: cafe-menu-special-edition

python-slugify uses the text-unidecode library under the hood for transliteration, which handles a wide range of Unicode characters including CJK.

Django’s Built-in slugify

If you’re using Django, it has a built-in slugify utility:

from django.utils.text import slugify

slug = slugify("My Blog Post Title")
# Output: my-blog-post-title

Note: Django’s slugifydoesn’t handle transliteration by default. For accented characters, combine it with unidecode.

PHP

Laravel’s Str::slug()

Laravel provides a clean slug helper:

use Illuminate\Support\Str;

$slug = Str::slug("Café Menu — Special Édition!");
// Output: cafe-menu-special-edition

Str::slug() handles transliteration, lowercasing, and special character removal in one call.

Manual Implementation

Without a framework, here’s a PHP slugify function:

function slugify(string $text): string {
    $text = transliterator_transliterate(
        'Any-Latin; Latin-ASCII; Lower()',
        $text
    );
    $text = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9\s-]/', '', $text);
    $text = preg_replace('/[\s_]+/', '-', $text);
    $text = preg_replace('/-+/', '-', $text);
    return trim($text, '-');
}

This uses PHP’s intl extension for transliteration. Make sure the intl extension is enabled in your php.ini.

Comparison Table

When to Use a Library vs. Online Tool

Use a librarywhen you need to generate slugs programmatically at runtime—for example, auto-generating a URL when a user creates a blog post.

Use an online tool when you need a one-off slug or want to quickly check what a title looks like as a URL. Our Text to Slug converter supports custom separators, max length, and transliteration—all the options you’d configure in a library, without writing any code.