How do I create a slug in Django?

Solution 1:

You will need to use the slugify function.

>>> from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify
>>> slugify("b b b b")
u'b-b-b-b'
>>>

You can call slugify automatically by overriding the save method:

class Test(models.Model):
    q = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    s = models.SlugField()
    
    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.s = slugify(self.q)
        super(Test, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

Be aware that the above will cause your URL to change when the q field is edited, which can cause broken links. It may be preferable to generate the slug only once when you create a new object:

class Test(models.Model):
    q = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    s = models.SlugField()
    
    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if not self.id:
            # Newly created object, so set slug
            self.s = slugify(self.q)

        super(Test, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

Solution 2:

There is corner case with some utf-8 characters

Example:

>>> from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify
>>> slugify(u"test ąęśćółń")
u'test-aescon' # there is no "l"

This can be solved with Unidecode

>>> from unidecode import unidecode
>>> from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify
>>> slugify(unidecode(u"test ąęśćółń"))
u'test-aescoln'

Solution 3:

A small correction to Thepeer's answer: To override save() function in model classes, better add arguments to it:

from django.utils.text import slugify

def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
    if not self.id:
        self.s = slugify(self.q)

    super(test, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

Otherwise, test.objects.create(q="blah blah blah") will result in a force_insert error (unexpected argument).

Solution 4:

If you're using the admin interface to add new items of your model, you can set up a ModelAdmin in your admin.py and utilize prepopulated_fields to automate entering of a slug:

class ClientAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    prepopulated_fields = {'slug': ('name',)}

admin.site.register(Client, ClientAdmin)

Here, when the user enters a value in the admin form for the name field, the slug will be automatically populated with the correct slugified name.