Extract hashtags

The real case: reusing the tags that work

Anyone posting on social media builds up, over time, sets of hashtags that perform, and keeps them scattered inside the captions of old posts. Finding them again means reopening a post, selecting them by hand and hoping not to clip one. Here you paste the whole caption and out comes the clean list, one per line, ready to save in a note or paste into the new post. It also works the other way round: take someone else's post and see plainly which tags they used.

How it finds them

Anything starting with # and carrying on with letters, digits or an underscore is picked up; the tag ends where a space or a punctuation mark begins. Accented letters are allowed, so #café comes out whole, and tags in scripts other than ours work exactly the same.

Repeated tags are removed: if the same tag appears three times in the caption, it appears once in the list. With one caveat: the comparison looks at capitals too, so #Rome and #rome stay two separate entries. To the social networks they are the same tag, so if both show up it's time to pick one form and stick to it.

What it doesn't do

It doesn't tell you whether a hashtag is popular, it doesn't look it up on any platform and it doesn't invent new ones: all that's read here is the text you pasted, and nothing leaves this page. If you're looking for tags to use, the right place is Hashtag generator. And remember the limits differ from one network to another: how many characters you have left is answered by Social character counter.

Nearby tools

For mentions with the at sign, instead of tags, there is Extract mentions. To clean a caption of asterisks and formatting Strip markdown, and to count how many times each word appears in a text Word frequency.