Naive character stripping breaks more than you'd expect
A slug generator that simply removes any character outside the basic a-z0-9 range mishandles accented characters badly — "café" can become "caf" (losing meaningful content) rather than the more correct "cafe" a proper Unicode normalization pass would produce, since the accented "é" needs to be decomposed into its base letter plus a combining accent mark before the accent mark itself can be safely stripped.
Why this matters for SEO and not just cosmetics
A slug that drops content unpredictably, or that differs from what a content author expects, creates a mismatch between the readable title and the URL — a minor issue for a single page, but a compounding source of confusion and broken external links across a large content catalog generated in batch.
The duplicate-slug problem most converters ignore entirely
Converting a batch of titles independently, without checking for collisions across the batch, can silently produce two identical slugs when two different titles happen to normalize to the same string — a routing conflict that surfaces only when someone tries to publish both pages and one silently overwrites or 404s the other.
What correct handling actually looks like
Proper Unicode NFD (Normalized Form Decomposition) separates a base character from its combining accent marks, letting the accent marks be stripped while preserving the meaningful base letter — turning "café" into "cafe" rather than "caf" or a broken fragment. Combined with a within-batch duplicate check that automatically numbers colliding slugs, batch slug generation becomes safe to run without manual review of every single output.
Why this is worth automating rather than doing by hand
Manually slugifying titles one at a time is tedious and error-prone at any real content volume, and manual conversion doesn't catch cross-batch duplicates the way a systematic pass does — automating both the normalization and the dedup check removes an entire class of avoidable content-publishing bugs.
Frequently Asked Questions
A naive approach simply strips any character outside a-z0-9, which removes the accented 'é' entirely along with its base letter — proper handling requires Unicode NFD decomposition to separate the base letter from its accent mark first, so only the accent mark is stripped and 'e' remains.
Converting titles independently without checking across the batch can produce two identical slugs when different titles happen to normalize to the same string — a real routing conflict that surfaces only when someone tries to publish both pages, at which point one silently overwrites or 404s the other.
Yes — you can choose between a hyphen or underscore separator and set an optional maximum length, with the tool cleanly trimming to a full word boundary rather than cutting mid-word or leaving a trailing separator.
Both — paste a single line for one-off use, or many lines at once for batch content publishing, where the automatic duplicate-numbering becomes especially valuable since manual review of every slug isn't practical at volume.
No. All slugification happens locally in your browser — nothing you paste is uploaded or logged anywhere.