SLUGIFY

Convert the input string to a lowercase, hyphen-separated, URL-safe slug.

Category: miscReturns: STRINGDialect: PostgreSql

Syntax

SLUGIFY(str)

Description

## Overview Converts the input string to a URL-safe slug: lowercase ASCII letters and digits separated by single hyphens. Accented characters are normalized to their ASCII equivalents (via the same logic as REMOVE_ACCENTS), then every run of non-alphanumeric characters is replaced with a single hyphen, and leading/trailing hyphens are stripped. ## Behavior - Returns NULL if the input is NULL. - Empty input (or input that reduces to only separators) returns an empty string. - Lowercases ASCII letters. - Strips diacritics from common Latin scripts. - Collapses runs of non-alphanumeric characters into a single hyphen. - Removes leading and trailing hyphens. - Deterministic and side effect free. ## Compatibility - Matches the PG-compat SLUGIFY semantics used by blogging and CMS toolchains.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
`str`		Specifies the input string. Accents are stripped, non-alphanumerics become hyphens, and the result is lowercased.

Examples

-- Basic title to slug
SELECT SLUGIFY('Hello World!');  -- 'hello-world'

-- Handle special characters and repeated separators
SELECT SLUGIFY('Product: 50% Off!');  -- 'product-50-off'

-- Remove accents before slugifying
SELECT SLUGIFY('Cafe\u0301 Cre\u0300me');  -- 'cafe-creme'

-- Generate URL-safe identifiers for articles
SELECT article_id, SLUGIFY(title) AS url_slug
FROM cms.catalog.articles;

-- NULL propagation
SELECT SLUGIFY(NULL);  -- NULL

Pitfalls

SLUGIFY strips characters it cannot transliterate (for example, CJK ideographs are removed rather than converted to pinyin). If your content is non-Latin, provide a language-specific transliteration step before calling SLUGIFY.
Two distinct titles can produce the same slug (`Foo-Bar` and `foo bar` both become `foo-bar`). Use a uniqueness suffix (timestamp or sequence) if you need a guaranteed-unique URL segment.
The function removes all punctuation including apostrophes. `SLUGIFY("John's Book")` returns `johns-book`, which may not match existing URLs.
Empty slugs are possible (for example, for `---` input). Always validate the result length before using it as a URL path segment.