Remove Punctuation
Strip punctuation marks from any text while keeping words and numbers.
Remove Punctuation from Text
Strip every punctuation mark from your text in one click. The result is plain words and numbers – ideal for word clouds, keyword research, text analysis, or preparing data for machine learning.
What you can control
- Apostrophes – keep them to preserve contractions like don't and you're.
- Hyphens – keep them for compound words like well-known or e-mail.
- Double spaces – removing punctuation can leave extra spaces behind; they are collapsed automatically.
Unicode aware
Most online tools only remove the ASCII characters on your keyboard. This one uses Unicode punctuation classes, so curly quotes (“ ”), guillemets (« »), em dashes (—), inverted question marks (¿), and full-width Asian punctuation (。、) are removed too.
Related tools
Combine it with Case Converter to normalize capitalization, Remove Accents to strip diacritics, or Word Frequency Counter to analyze the cleaned text.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which characters are removed?
All Unicode punctuation – periods, commas, colons, semicolons, quotes, brackets, dashes, exclamation and question marks, ellipses, and similar characters in any language – plus common ASCII symbols like ^, ~, |, <, >, + and =. Letters, numbers, spaces, emoji, and currency signs are kept.
Can I keep apostrophes in contractions?
Yes. Turn on 'Keep apostrophes' so words like don't and it's stay readable. You can keep hyphens in compound words the same way.
Does it work with non-English text?
Yes. The tool uses Unicode character classes, so punctuation from Turkish, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and other scripts is recognized as well.