How to Convert a Post Title into a Friendly URL (Slug) in C#

Most content management systems automatically convert your post title into a slug which forms the part of a URL used to locate the post. Here’s how to do it in C#

The term slug comes from the world of newspaper production and is the name used to reference the story. A content management system uses the slug portion of the URL to load the post (WordPress call it a Permalink).

For example the slug for this post is csharp-generate-slug and the full URL is: https://developingsoftware.com/csharp-generate-slug.

It’s a good idea to make a slug all lower case, replace dashes with spaces, and only use letters and digits.

Let’s see some sample code that generates a slug from a post title in C#

Example Code

public static class SlugUtil
{
    public static string Slugify(string input)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(input))
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("input");
        }

        var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
        foreach(char c in input.ToArray())
        {
            if (Char.IsLetterOrDigit(c))
            {
                stringBuilder.Append(c);
            }
            else if (c == ' ')
            {
                stringBuilder.Append("-");
            }
        }

        return stringBuilder.ToString().ToLower();
    }
}

The code above is really simple and does a basic job of replacing any spaces with dashes, making the slug lowercase and stripping out any characters that are not a letter or digit.

Example Usage

string title = "How to Convert a Post Title into a Friendly URL in C#";
string slug = SlugUtil.Slugify(title);

Now after running the post title through the Slugify function you will get a user friendly slug that can be used to make up the full URL to your post. In the example above the full URL would be:

https://developingsoftware.com/how-to-convert-a-post-title-into-a-friendly-url-in-c

If you find the slug is too long, you could always make it editable by the user and use the generated slug when first creating the post.