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Remove Punctuation — Strip Symbols & Special Characters

Strip Unicode punctuation and symbols from text. Optional keep apostrophes, hyphens, periods; whitespace collapse.

Free No signup Client-side Privacy friendly Updated

How to use

  1. 1 Paste any text into the input.
  2. 2 Default strips all Unicode punctuation and symbols (\p{P} and \p{S}).
  3. 3 Toggle to keep apostrophes, hyphens, or periods if needed.
  4. 4 Copy the cleaned text.

Why use this tool

  • Unicode-aware — removes punctuation from any script, not just ASCII.
  • Keep-apostrophes preserves contractions like "don't" intact.
  • Keep-periods preserves sentence boundaries.
  • Optional whitespace collapse cleans up the empty gaps left behind.

Frequently asked questions

What counts as punctuation?

Anything in the Unicode \p{P} category — periods, commas, brackets, dashes, quotes — plus \p{S} symbols (currency, math, other symbols like %, $, ©). Letters, digits, and whitespace are kept.

Does it remove emoji?

Yes — most emoji are in the \p{S} symbol category. Letters and digits inside an emoji ZWJ sequence may survive; turn off the toggle later if you want them out too.

How is "Keep apostrophes" applied?

Both straight ' and curly ’ survive when enabled. All other punctuation in the same character is still removed.

Related?

Use Whitespace Remover to also normalize spacing, or Remove Accents to convert é, ü, ñ to plain ASCII first.

What is Remove Punctuation?

A Remove Punctuation tool is a tool that strips Unicode punctuation and symbols from text. It offers options to keep apostrophes, hyphens, and periods, and to collapse whitespace after removal. Running entirely in the browser, it cleans text of special characters and symbols without uploading anything to a server, useful for normalizing input before analysis, search, or further processing.

Features

Unicode-aware removal

Removes all Unicode punctuation and symbols, not just ASCII, via \p{P}/\p{S} property escapes.

Keep what you need

Optionally preserve apostrophes, hyphens, or periods, and collapse leftover whitespace.

100% private

Runs on your device — your text is never uploaded.

Example

Input

Hello, world! (test)

Output

Hello world test

Common use cases

  1. 1

    Prepare text for analysis

    Strip punctuation before tokenizing for word counts or NLP.

  2. 2

    Clean up imported data

    Remove stray symbols from pasted or scraped text.

  3. 3

    Normalize for comparison

    Drop punctuation so two strings compare on words alone.

Summary

Zerethon's remove-punctuation tool strips punctuation and symbols from text in your browser using Unicode character properties (\p{P} and \p{S}), with optional whitespace collapsing. You can choose to keep apostrophes, hyphens, or periods. Everything runs client-side — nothing is uploaded.

Category
Creator
Pricing
Free
Privacy
Browser-based
Signup
Not required

References

Privacy

Your data never leaves your browser unless explicitly stated. Remove Punctuation runs entirely client-side — no server upload, no logging, no tracking of your input.

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