Turkish text
ASCII output
Turkish to ASCII converter
Strip Turkish characters (ç, ğ, ı, İ, ö, ş, ü) and turn any text into clean ASCII for slugs, filenames and legacy systems. Runs entirely in your browser.
Conversion runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded and the tool works offline. Turkish letters map to a single ASCII letter each (ş → s, not sh), and the result is lossy: keep the original Unicode text as your source.
Why convert Turkish text to ASCII?
Turkish uses six letters that do not exist in plain ASCII: ç, ğ, ı, İ, ö, ş and ü, in both cases. They are perfect for reading, but they break the moment text leaves a fully Unicode-aware environment. A URL slug, a file name on an old server, a database column with a Latin-1 collation, an SMS routed through a non-Turkish gateway, the local part of an e-mail address: all of these expect a narrow ASCII alphabet. Feed them a ş or an ı and you get %C5%9F soup, mojibake, rejected uploads or silently dropped characters. Converting to ASCII first (çağan → cagan) keeps the text readable everywhere while staying recognisable to a Turkish reader.
The dotted and dotless I trap
The single most common bug in Turkish text processing is the letter I. Turkish has two of them: dotless ı, whose capital is I, and dotted i, whose capital is İ. A naïve lowercase() turns İstanbul into i̇stanbul with a stray combining dot, and a naïve uppercase() turns ışık into IŞIK or worse. This tool sidesteps the problem by mapping each Turkish letter explicitly before doing anything else: ı → i, İ → I, so İstanbul becomes Istanbul and ışık becomes isik every time. Because the Turkish letters are gone before the lowercase or slug step runs, the rest of the pipeline is plain, unambiguous ASCII.
Turkish only vs. all accents
Two scopes are available. Turkish only touches exactly the six Turkish pairs and leaves every other character alone, ideal when your text is Turkish and you want predictable output. All accents adds a second pass that runs Unicode NFD normalisation and strips the combining diacritics, so café becomes cafe, mañana becomes manana and letters like ö are flattened too. Use it for mixed-language input (names, loanwords, imported data) where anything non-ASCII should go. Turn on lowercase to fold everything to lower case, and slug to produce a URL-ready token: spaces become hyphens, punctuation is dropped and repeated hyphens collapse.
Is it private, and is it reversible?
Everything runs in your browser with native JavaScript string APIs. Nothing is uploaded and the page works offline, so you can paste confidential names or documents safely. Bear in mind that the conversion is lossy and not reversible: once ş, ç and ı all collapse toward s, c and i, there is no automatic way to know that Sisli was once Şişli. Keep the original Unicode text as your source of truth and treat the ASCII version as a derived slug, filename or fallback, not a replacement.
Frequently asked questions
How do I turn Turkish text into a URL slug?
Paste your text, keep the scope on Turkish only or switch to All accents, then turn on both lowercase and slug. The tool converts the Turkish letters, folds everything to lower case, replaces spaces and punctuation with single hyphens and trims the ends, so Özün Çağan Altun becomes ozun-cagan-altun, ready to drop into a URL.
Why does ışık become isik and not ishik?
Because the Turkish ş maps to a single ASCII s, not the digraph sh, and ı maps to i. Turkish ASCII transliteration is letter-for-letter: ç→c, ğ→g, ı→i, ö→o, ş→s, ü→u. Digraphs like sh or ch belong to English spelling conventions and would make the result unrecognisable to a Turkish reader, so this tool does not use them.
Does it change é, ñ or other non-Turkish accents?
Only if you choose the All accents scope. In Turkish only mode, non-Turkish characters such as é, ñ and å are left untouched. Switch to All accents and a second Unicode NFD pass strips those diacritics too, turning é into e, ñ into n and å into a, which is handy for mixed-language names and imported data.
Is removing Turkish characters bad for SEO?
For URL slugs it is usually the safer choice. Modern search engines handle Unicode URLs, but ASCII slugs stay clean across shares, redirects and old systems, and never turn into %C3%A7 escapes when copied. Keep the visible page title and content in proper Turkish with its real letters. Only the slug, file name or ID needs to be ASCII.
Is my text uploaded to a server?
No. All conversion happens locally in your browser using native JavaScript, so your text never leaves your device and the tool works completely offline. You can deTurkify confidential names, documents or datasets without any of it touching a server.