Remove Punctuation
Strip punctuation and symbols from text, with the option to keep periods, hyphens, or apostrophes.
Stripped live as you type. Nothing leaves your browser.
What to keep
Apostrophes are kept by default so contractions stay readable: dont and shes are harder to read than the words you actually wrote. Line breaks are always preserved.
0 characters in, 0 out, 0 removed
How to remove punctuation from text
Paste your text
Drop in a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole document. It is cleaned the moment it lands.
Choose what to keep
Apostrophes stay by default so contractions keep reading properly. Add periods or hyphens back with one press, or turn every mark off.
Tidy the spacing
Leave Collapse spaces on to squeeze the double spaces that removed marks leave behind, while line breaks stay where they were.
Copy the result
Check the before and after character counts, then copy the cleaned text with one click.
Why use this tool
Goes well past ASCII
Smart quotes, en and em dashes, ellipsis characters, inverted question marks, and punctuation from other writing systems are all recognized, not just the marks on a US keyboard.
Keep the marks that matter
Apostrophes, periods, and hyphens each have their own toggle, so you can strip everything else while leaving contractions, sentence ends, or compound words intact.
Contractions stay readable
Apostrophes are kept by default, because dropping them turns common words into strings that are noticeably harder to read and that break word counts and search.
Line breaks are preserved
Paragraph structure survives. Only runs of spaces and tabs inside a line are squeezed, and only when you leave the collapse option on.
Live before and after counts
A quiet line under the result shows characters in, characters out, and how many were removed, so you can see the effect of each toggle immediately.
Runs entirely in your browser
Cleaning happens on your device as you type. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged.
About this tool
Punctuation gets in the way whenever text has to be compared, counted, or fed to something that only wants words. Stripping it is the usual first step before tokenizing a corpus, building a word frequency list, normalizing survey answers, preparing a search index, or checking two versions of a sentence that differ only in their commas. This tool removes punctuation and symbol characters the moment you paste, and updates live as you change what to keep.
It works on the full character set rather than a short list of ASCII marks. Curly quotes pasted out of a word processor, en and em dashes, ellipsis characters, mathematical and currency symbols, and punctuation from non-Latin scripts are all handled. Emoji count as symbols and go too, so if you want to target only those, remove emojis is the narrower tool.
Three marks have their own toggle because they carry meaning inside words rather than between them. Apostrophes are kept by default, since removing them turns everyday contractions into shapes that read badly and that many word counters treat as different words. Periods can stay when you still need sentence boundaries or decimals, and hyphens when compound words matter. Collapse spaces is on by default to clean up the gaps that removed marks leave behind, while line breaks are never touched. For neighboring cleanups, see remove accents for diacritics and remove whitespace for spacing on its own.
Frequently asked questions
- Which characters count as punctuation?
- Every punctuation and symbol character, not just the ones on a US keyboard. That covers commas, periods, quotes and curly quotes, brackets, slashes, dashes of every length, ellipsis characters, currency and math symbols, emoji, and punctuation from other writing systems.
- Why are apostrophes kept by default?
- Because they sit inside words rather than between them. Strip them and common contractions turn into strings like dont and shes, which read badly and are counted as different words by most tools. Turn the toggle off when you want them gone as well.
- Are my line breaks and paragraphs preserved?
- Yes. Line breaks are never removed. With Collapse spaces on, only runs of spaces and tabs inside a line are squeezed to one and each line is trimmed at its ends, so paragraph structure survives.
- Does it remove numbers or accented letters?
- No. Digits, letters, and accented letters are all left alone, because they are not punctuation. To strip the accents off letters while keeping the letters, use remove accents.
- Is my text uploaded anywhere?
- No. Everything runs in your browser as you type; nothing is sent to a server. Your text is never uploaded, stored, or logged.
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