How to create slugs in C# with Slugify

Slugify is an open-source library for .NET that allows generating slugs from text strings.

Slugs are a way of representing a text string widely used in URLs and web resource identification systems.

Basically, they are a “sanitized” way of encoding text, removing characters like spaces, accents, and other symbols, making them compatible with URL addresses while still being easily readable by humans.

Slugify handles formatting text strings by applying a set of rules that remove special characters, convert characters to lowercase, or replace spaces with hyphens.

How to Use Slugify

To install “Slugify” in a .NET project, you can use the NuGet package manager. Open the NuGet Package Manager Console and run the command

Now, using Slugify is very simple. We only need to use the ‘GenerateSlug’ method of the ‘SlugHelper’ class.

var text = "A useful example of a Slug";
var slug = new SlugHelper().GenerateSlug(text);

Console.WriteLine(slug); // output: a-useful-example-of-a-slug

Additionally, we can change the configuration used for creating the Slug.

// Creating a configuration object
SlugHelper.Config config = new SlugHelper.Config();

// Replace spaces with a hyphen
config.CharacterReplacements.Add(" ", "-");

// We want a lowercase Slug
config.ForceLowerCase = true;

// Collapse consecutive whitespace chars into one
config.CollapseWhiteSpace = true;

var slugify = new SlugHelper(config);
var slug = new SlugHelper().GenerateSlug("whatever");

In short, a simple library that does its job correctly and will be very useful for generating slugs or URLs from an arbitrary string.