My offer title has emojis, exclamation marks and a plus sign; why did they all disappear from the URL?
Because the slug generator keeps only letters and digits. Emojis, punctuation and symbols such as + all turn into separators, then runs of separators collapse into one and are trimmed from both ends. So a decorated offer title still comes out as a clean slug anyone can read and type.
What happened to the title
An offer title as it might be written for an Instagram or Snapchat post:
🔥 SALE! Coffee + Cardamom 🔥
In Latin mode with the defaults, the slug is:
sale-coffee-cardamom
That is 20 characters. The fire at both ends, the exclamation mark, the spaces and the plus sign all became separators, then consecutive separators were shortened to one hyphen and the hyphens at the start and end were removed. An Arabic title behaves the same way in Arabic mode: 🔥 عرض خاص! قهوة + هيل 🔥 becomes عرض-خاص-قهوة-هيل.
See the hidden step
To see what is going on, switch off 'Collapse repeated separators into one' and 'Trim separators from both ends' with the Arabic title. The result becomes:
--عرض-خاص--قهوة---هيل--
Every symbol or space became its own hyphen: the leading emoji and its space make two, the exclamation mark and its space make two, and the space, plus sign and space after it make three. That happens internally every time, and the two options that are on by default are what clean it up. Switch them back on; there is no practical reason to keep a slug looking like this.
Why emoji do not stay in the URL
- A URL gets typed, read out and copied in many places: messages, stickers, business cards. Emoji are awkward to type by hand and impossible to read aloud.
- Each emoji becomes several characters when the URL is encoded, so the encoded form grows for nothing.
- Marks such as +, ! and ? have special meanings in some parts of URLs or in some systems, so it is safest to keep them out of the slug entirely.
What if the symbol carried meaning?
In Coffee + Cardamom the plus means 'with', and it is gone. If you want that meaning in the URL, write it as a word in the title before converting, such as Coffee with Cardamom. In Latin mode alone the ampersand gets special treatment: it becomes 'and' while that option is on. The plus and every other symbol become separators in both modes.
The steps
- Open the URL slug generator and paste the offer title as it is, decorations and all.
- Leave collapsing and trimming on as they are.
- Read the slug, and if an important meaning lived in a symbol, add it as a word in the title.
- Copy the slug, and keep the emoji for the page title and the post text, where they belong.
Common questions
Do numbers like the 50 in '50% off' stay?
Yes. Digits stay, and the % becomes a separator, which is trimmed if it ends the slug.
Is an Arabic word affected by an emoji stuck to it?
No. The emoji becomes a separator and the words before and after it stay as they are.
Can the emoji stay in the product page title?
The tool only builds the slug. You write the page title on your platform however you like.