Remove Punctuation from Text
| Input | Output | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Hello, world! | Hello world | comma and bang go, space stays |
| don't | dont | apostrophes count as punctuation |
| O'Brien | OBrien | name-matching friendly |
| 3.14 | 314 | decimal points go too - see FAQ |
Paste text and this tool strips every punctuation mark - periods, commas, apostrophes, quotes, hyphens, brackets, and the typographic curly versions word processors sneak in - leaving clean letters, digits and spaces. The counter reports exactly how many marks were removed, and everything else passes through untouched: numbers keep their decimal points' neighbors, words keep their spelling, lines keep their shape.
The working reasons: keyword lists and search indexes that choke on apostrophes, name-matching where O'Brien and OBrien should be the same string, cleaning text for word games, and feeding scripts that assume plain words and spaces. It is the punctuation member of the cleanup family - accents have their remover, emoji theirs, quotes their converter - and this one handles the whole mark set in one pass.
How to use
- Paste your text - the punctuation-free version appears live with a count of removed marks.
- Copy the result straight out; spaces between words are preserved, never collapsed.
- For full ASCII-flat text, chain the remove-accents tool after this one.
Frequently asked questions
How do I remove punctuation from text?
Paste it above - the stripped version builds live. The tool removes the full ASCII punctuation set (periods, commas, apostrophes, quotes, hyphens, slashes, brackets, math and currency symbols) plus the typographic forms - curly quotes, en and em dashes, ellipses - which word processors substitute silently. Spaces between words are preserved exactly, so word counts and line structure survive.
Does it remove apostrophes inside words?
Yes - don't becomes dont, O'Brien becomes OBrien. That is the point for matching and indexing work, where the two spellings should count as one word. If you need hyphens or apostrophes kept inside words but stripped at the edges, that is a different job - the find-and-replace tool can target specific marks instead of the whole set.
What about decimal points and currency symbols?
They go too - 3.14 becomes 314 and $50 becomes 50, because the tool strips punctuation categories, not numbers. For extracting numbers intact (decimals, negatives, thousands separators), use the extract-numbers tool instead, which is built to keep numeric structure while dropping everything else.
Will it touch accented letters or emoji?
No - letters with accents are letters, and emoji are not punctuation. The strip targets the punctuation blocks only: ASCII marks plus the typographic curly quotes, dashes and ellipsis. For accents, use remove-accents; for emoji, remove-emoji; each cleaner in the family has its own scope so they stack cleanly.
Why would anyone strip punctuation?
Matching and indexing: name deduplication (OBrien equals O'Brien), keyword lists for search, slug-adjacent cleanup before further processing. Writers use it for constraint exercises and word games; data folks use it before splitting text on spaces, where a trailing comma would otherwise become part of the last word. It is a small tool with one clear job.