How to use the remove punctuation
- 1Paste your text into Text with punctuation.
- 2Choose Characters to remove: All punctuation, Punctuation and symbols, or Only the characters I list.
- 3Adjust what to keep: apostrophes and hyphens inside words, dots and commas inside numbers, and anything typed into Always keep.
- 4Copy the result from Text without punctuation.
Example
Hello, world! Don't panic — it's a well-known trick (really?). Price: $29.99 & 50% off… #deal 🎉
Hello world Don't panic it's a well-known trick really Price $29.99 50 off deal 🎉
Default settings (All punctuation). The apostrophes, the hyphen and the decimal point stay. “$” is a currency symbol rather than punctuation, so it stays unless you choose Punctuation and symbols; the emoji stays unless you tick Remove emoji too.
Choosing what to remove
- All punctuation removes every character Unicode classes as punctuation:
. , ; : ! ?, straight and curly quotes, brackets, dashes, the ellipsis, and also& # % @ * / \and_. - Punctuation and symbols also removes symbols: currency signs,
+ = < > ^ | ~, ©, ° and ™. - Only the characters I list removes exactly the characters you type into Remove these characters, and nothing else.
Replace with decides whether a removed character leaves nothing or a space. Choose A space when punctuation sits between words without spaces, such as end.Start or red/green, so they don't run together.
Keeping apostrophes and hyphens
Keep apostrophes inside words keeps the apostrophe in contractions and possessives (don't, it's, O'Neil), straight or curly, while quotation marks at the edges of words are still removed. Keep hyphens inside words keeps “well-known” as one word but removes dashes between spaces. Keep . and , inside numbers protects decimals and thousands separators such as 29.99 and 1,000.
Anything typed into Always keep is never removed, for example @# to keep handles and hashtags.
Special characters and emoji
Emoji are kept unless you tick Remove emoji too; flags, skin tones and family emoji are removed as one unit, so no broken pieces are left behind. Accented letters are letters, not special characters, so they stay; convert them with remove accents. Spaces left over are tidied by Tidy up spaces afterwards, or more thoroughly with remove extra spaces.
Punctuation removal for text analysis
Word-frequency counts, keyword research and simple text classifiers usually need words without punctuation so that “tools,” and “tools” count as the same token. Keep apostrophes so contractions stay one word, then lowercase the text with the case converter. To see the most frequent terms afterwards, use the keyword density checker.
Is my text private?
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your text is not uploaded to our servers.