Remove Special Characters
Strip punctuation, symbols, and special characters from text online. Keeps letters, numbers, and spaces. Free and instant.
Example — type your own text above to convert it.
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.