Slug

A slug is a URL-friendly string derived from a human-readable label. It typically consists of lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens, with spaces and special characters removed or replaced.

Slugs are widely used in web applications to build readable, SEO-friendly URLs. For example, the title Hello World! becomes the slug hello-world.

PHP does not have a built-in slug generator, but the transformation can be achieved by combining strtolower(), preg_replace(), and transliteration via iconv(). Many frameworks and libraries also provide dedicated helpers.

<?php

    function slugify(string $text): string {
        $text = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $text);
        $text = strtolower($text);
        $text = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9]+/', '-', $text);
        return trim($text, '-');
    }

    echo slugify('Hello World!'); // hello-world

?>

Documentation

See also What is a slug?.

Related : Universal Resource Locator (URL), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), strtolower(), String, Unique Identifier