Should URLs use underscores or hyphens?

Hyphens. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so `blue_widgets` can be read as a single token while `blue-widgets` is read as two words. Use underscores for filenames, database identifiers and code, not for URL paths.

Does the generator handle accented characters?

Yes. Accented Latin characters are transliterated to their closest ASCII equivalent — `é` to `e`, `ü` to `u` — rather than stripped, so `Crème brûlée` becomes `creme_brulee` instead of losing letters.

Can I change an existing URL slug?

You can, but redirect the old one with a 301. Changing a slug without a redirect discards every link and every ranking signal the old URL accumulated, and the new URL starts from nothing.

Underscore Slug Generator

When Underscores Beat Hyphens

For URLs, hyphens win — Google has stated for years that it treats a hyphen as a word separator and an underscore as a word joiner, so red_shoes reads as one token and red-shoes as two.

Everywhere else, underscores are frequently the right choice:

Context	Separator	Why
URL paths	Hyphen	Treated as a word break by search engines
Python modules and variables	Underscore	PEP 8 requires it
SQL tables and columns	Underscore	Hyphens require quoting
Filenames in scripts	Underscore	A leading hyphen looks like a command flag
Environment variables	Underscore	The only separator POSIX permits
CSS classes	Hyphen	Convention, and hyphens read better in selectors

The Filename Argument

A file named -report.csv is genuinely dangerous in a shell: most commands parse it as an option. rm -report.csv fails, and worse constructions do something unintended. Underscores have no such meaning anywhere in a shell.

Double-Click Selection

In most editors and terminals, double-clicking a word stops at a hyphen and continues through an underscore. For an identifier you want selected as a unit — a table name, a variable — that behaviour is a real ergonomic argument for the underscore.

What the Generator Does

Beyond swapping the separator, converting a title to a slug means:

Transliterating accents. Crème brûlée becomes creme_brulee, not crm_brle.
Removing punctuation rather than encoding it.
Collapsing runs so no double separators appear.
Trimming the ends, since a leading or trailing separator is always wrong.
Lower-casing, unless the target is case-sensitive and you want it preserved.

Stop Words

Removing the, a, of and similar shortens a slug without changing what it says. For identifiers that is usually good; for URLs it can hurt readability. The generator makes it optional because there is no single right answer.

Slugs in a Real Content System

Decision	Recommendation
Generate from	The title, at draft time, then let the author edit
Freeze on	First publish — after that, changing it costs a redirect
Collisions	Append `-2`, not a timestamp or a random suffix
Depth	`/blog/post-name`, not `/blog/2026/08/category/post-name`
Case	Lowercase, always — URLs are case-sensitive on most servers

Store the slug as a column with a unique index rather than deriving it on read. Deriving it means a title edit silently changes every link to the page.

Redirects When One Changes

``301 /old-slug → /new-slug`

Permanent, kept forever, and never chained. Two hops lose more than one, and a chain of three is treated by crawlers as a soft failure. Keep a redirect table rather than editing the previous rule in place.

`Non-Latin Titles`

Transliteration is the pragmatic choice for a Latin-script audience — Приветbecomesprivet. If your readers use the script, keep it: modern browsers and search engines handle IDN and percent-encoded UTF-8 paths correctly, and/статья` is more readable to a Russian speaker than any transliteration. The wrong answer is silently dropping the characters, which produces an empty or mangled slug.