Remove Special Characters
Strip punctuation, symbols, and special characters from text online. Keeps letters, numbers, and spaces. Free and instant.
This tool strips punctuation, symbols, and underscores from your text, keeping only letters, digits, and spaces. Line breaks are preserved.
Examples
| Input | Output |
|---|---|
| Hello, world! (test #1) | Hello world test 1 |
| price: $19.99 — 20% off | price 1999 20 off |
When to use the remove special characters
Stripping punctuation is a preprocessing step, not an editing one. It comes up when text has to become a key rather than stay prose:
- Generating slugs and filenames. Remove the punctuation first, then run the result through the kebab-case converter.
- Preparing text for analysis. Word-frequency counts and search indexes typically discard punctuation so that
word.andwordcount as the same token. - Cleaning imported data where stray symbols from a copy-paste break a CSV parse or a validation rule.
Two things to check before you run it. Removing punctuation from prices and dates destroys meaning — $19.99 becomes 1999. And accented letters are treated as letters, so café survives intact; if you need plain ASCII, that is a separate transliteration step.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly counts as a special character?
Anything that is not a letter, a digit, or whitespace — punctuation, currency symbols, mathematical operators, and the underscore.
Are accented characters like é removed?
No. Accented letters are letters, so café stays café. Removing accents is transliteration, which is a different operation.
Does it remove line breaks?
No. Line breaks are whitespace and are preserved, so your line structure survives.