Take out the marks, keep the meaning.

What it does

Remove Punctuation deletes punctuation marks from text and leaves the letters, digits, spaces, and line breaks in place. It is a character-level operation, not a grammar rewrite: the tool does not add or remove words, change capitalization, or decide that a sentence no longer needs a comma.

The default ASCII set covers the punctuation on a standard US keyboard. The Unicode mode widens the net to the punctuation category defined by Unicode, which includes curly quotes, em dashes, ellipses, non-breaking hyphens, and full-width or ideographic marks used in other writing systems. For English prose, ASCII is usually enough; for text pasted from Word or a multilingual page, Unicode catches the marks that ASCII misses.

Keeping important marks

Blanket punctuation removal is rarely what you want. Apostrophes, hyphens, and periods carry meaning. The tool lets you keep each of those groups independently.

• Apostrophes. Keeps “it’s”, “don’t”, and “O’Connor” readable. Turn this off when the output is going into a system that expects bare letters, or when you are building a word list where the apostrophe is noise.
• Hyphens and dashes. Keeps phone numbers, ranges such as 10–20, and compound words. If you remove them, “well-known” becomes “wellknown” unless you replace with a space instead.
• Periods. Keeps decimals (42.5), version numbers (2.0.1), initials (J. R. R. Tolkien), and ellipses made of periods. Removing periods is common for search normalization and uncommon for display text.

The keep options are applied after the punctuation set is chosen. A mark that is not in the chosen set is never a candidate for removal, so keeping it has no additional effect.

What happens to the gaps

Removing a mark can leave two spaces, a space at the start of a line, or a missing gap where the mark was doing the separating. Two cleanup options address that. “Collapse the spaces left behind” turns runs of spaces into one, and “Trim line edges” removes the spaces at the start and end of each line.

If you choose “a space” as the replacement, each mark becomes one space. That keeps “one,two,three” from becoming “onetwothree”. It can also create double spaces around a mark that already had spaces on both sides, which is why the collapse option is usually left on.

Examples

"Hello, world!" she said. (It was early.)

Hello world she said It was early

Quotes, commas, periods, and brackets disappear. The apostrophe option does not matter here because there is no contraction. With “replace with a space” on, the gaps left by the marks would be preserved instead of collapsing into the surrounding text.

The 42.5 kg box is well-known.

The 42.5 kg box is well-known

Only the sentence-ending period is removed. The decimal point and the compound hyphen survive, which is usually the desired reading. Turn either keep option off if you need a bare sequence.

“Ready?” she asked — “almost…”

Ready she asked almost

Curly quotes, the question mark, the em dash, and the ellipsis are all punctuation in the Unicode category. ASCII-only mode would leave the curly quotes and the em dash behind, which is the usual reason a “remove punctuation” pass fails on Word text.

Limits worth knowing

• Punctuation is not the same as symbols. Currency signs, mathematical operators, and emoji are generally symbols, not punctuation. They survive a punctuation pass even in Unicode mode.
• Removing punctuation can merge words. “Hello,world” becomes “Helloworld” when the replacement is nothing. Use a space replacement or add a space first.
• Abbreviations lose their periods. “Dr.” becomes “Dr”, “e.g.” becomes “eg”. If the text must remain readable, keep periods or remove punctuation from a copy and leave the original alone.
• No accent folding or case conversion. The tool removes marks; it does not normalize accented letters, lowercase the result, or strip emoji. Those are separate transformations.
• Nothing is stored. A refresh clears the input. Copy the result before leaving the page.

Page updated 27 October 2026