Remove accents

Where accented letters cause trouble

Plenty of digital systems handle accents poorly: URLs and domain names turn them into unreadable escape codes, some business software and banking forms reject them outright, file names containing accents can get garbled when moving between operating systems, and airline tickets or international documents require plain characters (that's why "Muñoz" shows up as "Munoz" on a boarding pass). Converting your text before pasting it prevents errors and mangled characters like "é" appearing where an "é" should be.

How the conversion works (Unicode NFD)

Under the Unicode standard, every accented letter can be decomposed into two parts: the base letter and the diacritical mark that goes with it ("é" = "e" + acute accent). This tool applies exactly that decomposition, called NFD normalization, and then strips the diacritical marks, leaving only the base letters. The result works with French and Spanish accents but also with German umlauts (ü → u), Spanish tildes (ñ → n), French cedillas (ç → c), and ligatures such as œ → oe.

Letters with no accent to strip

Some letters are not a letter plus a mark, so the decomposition leaves them alone: the German ß, the ligatures æ and œ, the Danish ø, the Croatian đ and the Polish ł. Here they become what you type in their place on a keyboard that lacks them: ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae, œ becomes oe, ø becomes o, đ becomes d and ł becomes l. Capitals stay capitals: «STRAẞE» becomes «STRASSE» and «Ærø» becomes «Aero».

Greek letters lose their accents just like Latin ones: «ά» becomes «α». Other scripts are not touched: in Russian «й» is not an «и» with an accent but a different letter, and a Japanese kana with the two small strokes is a different syllable, so removing those marks would change the words. The Turkish dotless «ı» and the Icelandic letters «þ» and «ð» also stay as they are, because they have no plain form to turn into.

Several clean-ups at once, in a fixed order

Below the box you will find all ten clean-ups of this family, and you can tick as many as you like: each page starts with its own already ticked. The program is the same on all ten, so the same text with the same boxes gives the same result on whichever page you paste it.

The order does not depend on which boxes you tick, and it is the order you see them in: first the characters (emojis, accents, numbers, punctuation), then the spaces inside each line (tabs, indentation, extra spaces), then whole lines (blank and duplicate) and last of all joining everything into one line. So a line that is left empty once the emojis are gone disappears with the blank lines, and two lines that become identical once the spaces are gone count as duplicates.

The sister pages, each with its own box already ticked: Remove extra spaces, Remove indentation, Remove blank lines, Remove duplicate lines, Remove emojis, Remove punctuation, Remove numbers, Text on one line and Tabs to spaces.