Remove punctuation
Strip everything except letters, digits and whitespace: commas, quotes, hyphens, symbols, emoji and CJK marks all go. Decimals and dates lose their dots.
Enter text to see output.
What to know
This operation keeps only letters, numbers and whitespace from any script and deletes every other character in the text. That covers commas, quotes, brackets, hyphens, apostrophes, slashes, currency signs and underscores, plus emoji and CJK marks such as 。 and 「」.
The rule is blunt, so check what it does to numbers. Hello, world! It's 3.14 (approx.) #1 — 100% 😀 snake_case becomes Hello world Its 314 approx 1 100 snakecase. The decimal point disappears, so 3.14 turns into 314, and 2024-05-01 turns into 20240501.
Spaces are left alone, which is why a standalone symbol such as the dash in the example leaves a double space behind. Follow with trim whitespace to squeeze those gaps. Line breaks also survive, since they count as whitespace.
One edge case matters for some scripts: combining marks are not letters, so a decomposed accent, where e and the accent are separate code points, loses the accent and an Indic vowel sign vanishes. Precomposed characters such as the é in café are unaffected.
Typical uses are preparing text for word-frequency analysis, building search keys and cleaning subtitles or lyrics copied with decorations.
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How to use Remove punctuation
- Paste a sample such as Hello, world! (test) 3.14 into the Text input box.
- Check the Output panel: it should read Hello world test 314, with the dot gone from 3.14.
- If numbers with decimals or dates matter, protect them by using find and replace on the punctuation you want to drop instead.
- Run trim whitespace on the output to collapse double spaces, then copy the result.
Quick answers
Why did 3.14 become 314?
A decimal point is punctuation, so it is deleted like any other. The same happens to the hyphens in 2024-05-01 and to the plus sign and hyphens in a phone number.
Are apostrophes removed from words like it's?
Yes, It's becomes Its, and the underscore in snake_case is removed as well. Only letters, digits and whitespace survive.
Does it remove emoji?
Yes. Emoji and other symbols are neither letters nor digits, so they are deleted, and a standalone one leaves a double space that trim whitespace can fix.
Why do some accents vanish?
Accents stored as separate combining marks are not counted as letters. Text copied from some macOS files can contain them, and the accent is dropped while the base letter stays.