kebab-case Converter

Kebab case (stylized as kebab-case) is a text formatting and naming convention where all letters are converted to lowercase and individual words are joined together using single hyphens (-) without spaces or punctuation (for example: user-profile-settings, blog-post-title).

In programming and software development, kebab case is the standard convention for naming CSS classes and IDs (.main-nav-container), HTML custom elements and data attributes (data-user-id, <custom-modal-dialog>), REST API URI endpoints, URL slugs, and package names in package registries like NPM (express-session). It is rarely used for internal variable or function names in languages like JavaScript, Python, or Java because compilers parse the hyphen (-) as a subtraction operator.

It is called kebab case because the horizontal hyphens piercing through the center of lowercase words visually resemble pieces of meat and vegetables skewered on a culinary shish kebab skewer.

The primary difference lies in the word delimiter and capitalization. Kebab case uses all-lowercase letters separated by hyphens (e.g., calculate-tax-rate), making it human-readable and ideal for web URLs and CSS. In contrast, CamelCase (camelCase / PascalCase) eliminates all spaces and hyphens, relying on uppercase letters to delineate word boundaries (e.g., calculateTaxRate in camelCase or CalculateTaxRate in PascalCase), which is standard for JavaScript, TypeScript, and Java identifiers.

Kebab case is also known by several synonyms across different computing contexts, including spinal-case, dash-case, hyphen-case, param-case, caterpillar-case, and lisp-case (since the Lisp programming language family historically permits hyphens in variable names). In web publishing and content management systems, it is frequently called a URL slug or permalink.

Classic examples of kebab case include converting the sentence "Getting Started with Web Development" into getting-started-with-web-development, converting the camelCase variable userShippingAddressLine1 into user-shipping-address-line-1, and converting the snake_case identifier customer_order_history into customer-order-history.

Kebab case uses hyphens as delimiters (user-profile-data), whereas snake_case uses underscores (user_profile_data). Kebab case is preferred for SEO URLs, permalinks, and CSS stylesheets, while snake_case is standard in Python (PEP 8), Ruby, SQL column definitions, and database schemas where hyphens would cause arithmetic syntax errors.

Google and major search engines explicitly recommend using hyphens (kebab-case) rather than underscores or camelCase in URL paths. Google search algorithms interpret hyphens as natural word separators, allowing them to index /kebab-case-converter as distinct keywords ("kebab", "case", "converter"). In contrast, underscores or concatenated words can be treated as single continuous strings.

In most major programming languages (such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C++, Java, C#, and Go), the hyphen (-) is a reserved arithmetic operator for subtraction. If you write let first-name = "Alex", the interpreter or compiler interprets this as let first - name = "Alex" (subtracting variable name from first), triggering a syntax error.

To convert text into kebab case, paste your title, phrase, camelCase identifier, or snake_case string into our free online Kebab Case Converter. The tool automatically removes special characters, converts uppercase letters to lowercase, replaces whitespace and underscores with hyphens, and formats clean kebab-case slugs with 0ms client-side latency.