How to use the Remove Special Characters
- Paste your text.
- Choose what to keep: punctuation, line breaks, accented letters.
- Optionally list extra characters to keep.
- Copy the cleaned text.
Example
| Input | Hello!!! 👋 Price: $9.99 #deal |
|---|---|
| Result | Hello Price 999 deal |
What is kept and what is removed
By default the tool keeps letters (including accented ones in any alphabet), numbers and spaces, and removes everything else: punctuation, symbols, emoji and other special characters. Dashes, slashes, underscores and bullets are replaced with a space instead of being deleted, so words do not run together. The summary says how many characters were removed.
Options
- Keep basic punctuation: keeps . , ! ? ' " - : ; in the text. It is off by default.
- Keep line breaks (on by default): untick to turn line breaks into spaces.
- ASCII letters only (remove accents): turns “café” into “cafe” and removes letters that have no plain equivalent, leaving only A to Z and numbers.
- Collapse spaces (on by default): turns repeated spaces into one and trims each line.
- Also keep these characters: type any characters you want to protect, such as @ or #, and they will not be removed.
When it helps
- Cleaning text copied from websites, PDFs and chats before you analyse it.
- Preparing names, IDs or search terms for a system that only accepts letters and numbers.
- Removing stray symbols from a text export.
- Creating plain text for tools that cannot display symbols.
Tips
- Turn on “Keep basic punctuation” if you only want to strip symbols and keep readable sentences.
- Use “Also keep these characters” for things like email addresses or hashtags, for example @ and #.
- For emoji only, use the Remove Emojis, which also handles skin tones and flags.
- To clean up spacing afterwards, use the Remove Extra Spaces. To make a URL-friendly version of a title, use the Slug Generator.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a special character?
Anything that is not a letter, number or space — for example punctuation, symbols, emojis and invisible control characters.
Are letters from other languages kept?
Yes, by default all letters are kept, including accented and non-Latin letters. Turn on “ASCII letters only” to keep just A–Z.
Why did my hyphens turn into spaces?
Dashes, slashes and underscores are replaced with a space so that words stay separate. Tick “Keep basic punctuation” to keep hyphens, or list the character under “Also keep these characters”.
Will it remove letters from other languages?
No, not by default. Letters in any alphabet are kept. Only the “ASCII letters only” option strips them.