About Remove Punctuation
Remove Punctuation strips everything from a block of text that is not a letter, a number or whitespace. What remains is words and the spacing between them, which is the form most search indexes, keyword analysers and matching routines actually want.
Letters are recognised by their Unicode category rather than by the Latin alphabet alone, so accented characters and non-Latin scripts survive the pass. That is a meaningful difference from a plain ASCII filter, which would mangle any text outside the basic Latin range.
Two consequences are worth expecting. Punctuation inside a word is removed rather than replaced with a space, so a hyphenated compound becomes a single joined word — which is why a keyword extracted from such text will not match the words as they are usually written. And symbols that are not classed as punctuation, along with emoji, are also removed because they are neither letters nor numbers, so decorative characters do not survive the pass.
How to use Remove Punctuation
- 1 Paste the text to clean.
- 2 Read the output, which contains only letters, numbers and whitespace.
- 3 Check hyphenated and contracted words, which will have been joined together.
Frequently asked questions
Why did my hyphenated words join up?
Because a hyphen is removed like any other punctuation and nothing is inserted in its place. A compound written with a hyphen therefore becomes one word, so if keyword matching matters, add spaces at those points before running the cleanup.
Are apostrophes removed as well?
Yes, which turns contractions into joined words. That is fine for a bag-of-words index and wrong for text that a human will read, so choose the target carefully before applying the pass.
Does it keep accented letters and non-Latin scripts?
It does. The filter keeps anything in a letter or number category, so accented characters, Greek, Cyrillic and CJK text all pass through. Only punctuation, symbols and emoji are discarded.
Can I remove punctuation except for specific characters?
Not with this tool, which applies a single rule uniformly. If a character must survive — a decimal point in numbers, for example — either protect those passages before the pass or use a targeted find and replace afterwards.
Free, online, and private
Free to use
Remove Punctuation is completely free. There is no account to create, no login, and no hidden charge or usage limit.
Runs online in your browser
It is a free online tool that runs entirely in your browser. Nothing to download or install — open the page and start using it right away.
Your data stays private
All processing happens locally on your device. Your input is never uploaded, stored, or tracked, so it never leaves your browser.
How Remove Punctuation behaves in detail
These are the specifics of this implementation — the exact ranges, defaults and fixed settings you are working with.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Rule | a keep-list rather than a punctuation blacklist — anything that is not a letter, a digit or whitespace is deleted |
| Character classes | matched with the Unicode property escapes \p{L} and \p{N}, so accented letters and CJK survive |
| Whitespace | preserved, so the original word boundaries stay where they were |
| Update mode | live — recomputed on every keystroke |
Compiled from the implementation of this tool and checked against it by itoolnet.
What Remove Punctuation does not do
Knowing the edges of a tool saves more time than another list of its features. These are the cases where it will not do what you might expect.
- Symbols go out with the punctuation. Currency signs, mathematical operators, the percent sign, the degree sign and emoji all sit outside the keep-list, so "Total: $5 (20% off)" comes back as "Total 5 20 off" — the digits survive but what they meant does not.
- Decimal points, thousands separators, minus signs and hyphens are dropped, which changes numbers instead of merely tidying them. "3.14" becomes "314" and "-7" becomes "7", so the output must not be reused wherever the values still matter.
- Punctuation inside a word is removed without a replacement, so words are run together: "don't" becomes "dont" and "well-known" becomes "wellknown". The result is not simply the input minus its punctuation, and no report says which words were altered.
Tested and documented by itoolnet, the team that builds and maintains this site.