How do I make a URL for a product with a French or German name that has letters like é and ß?
Use Latin mode in the slug generator. Accents are stripped, so é becomes e and û becomes u, and letters that cannot be decomposed go through a small table, so ß becomes ss and æ becomes ae. Anything still outside a-z and 0-9 after that is removed and shown in the dropped-characters list so you can see it.
An example from an imported sweets range
A product name mixing French and German words:
Café Crème Brûlée Straße
In Latin mode it becomes:
cafe-creme-brulee-strasse
Nothing dropped, no warning. Every accented letter found its counterpart: é to e, è to e, û to u, and ß to ss.
How it works: two routes
Most accented European letters are, in Unicode, an ordinary Latin letter with a mark above or below it. The tool splits the letter into those two parts, drops the mark and keeps the letter. That is how é, à, ü, ñ and ç become plain letters.
Some letters, though, are not a letter plus a mark but letters in their own right, and they do not split. For those the tool has an explicit table: ß to ss, ø to o, ł to l, æ to ae, œ to oe, đ to d, þ to th, ð to d. An example from Scandinavian and Polish products: Smørrebrød Łódź Æble becomes smorrebrod-lodz-aeble.
What still gets dropped
Any letter that does not end up as a-z or 0-9 after both steps is removed and listed under the result in the 'Characters dropped because they are outside ASCII' line, with a count. That includes letters of non-Latin scripts such as Arabic and Greek. Symbols become separators instead: Pâte à Tartiner ½ kg ™ becomes pate-a-tartiner-1-2-kg-tm, because ½ decomposes into 1 and 2 and ™ turns into tm. Review cases like that; you may not want 1-2 in your URL.
Why not use Arabic mode here?
Arabic mode keeps letters exactly as they are, accents included, so the same title becomes café-crème-brûlée-straße at 24 characters, but 49 in encoded form, because every accented letter is encoded. That is a valid URL, yet awkward to type on an ordinary Arabic or English keyboard. If your Gulf audience types in English, Latin mode suits these names better.
The steps
- Open the URL slug generator and paste the product name.
- Choose 'Latin ASCII'.
- If the dropped-characters line appears, read it and decide whether the word needs writing another way.
- Check symbols such as ½ and ™, edit the result in the field if needed, then copy it.
Common questions
Do capital letters stay?
Not by default: the lowercase option is on, so Straße becomes strasse.
Can ß become a single letter?
No. The table is fixed: ß always becomes ss.
What about a Turkish name with ı or İ?
They are in the table too: ı becomes i, and İ becomes I, then i once lowercased.