Remove numbers

When you need the digits gone

The most frequent case is a list copied out of a PDF or a web page that drags its numbering along: «1. Apples», «2. Pears», «3. Kiwis». If that list is going into a document that numbers items by itself, the old digits become a duplicate. Same story with transcripts carrying a timecode in front of every line, with catalogues where each entry starts with a product code, and with texts being prepared for language analysis, where numbers are just noise.

What exactly gets removed

Only the ten digits from 0 to 9. Letters, accents, punctuation, spaces and emoji stay where they are, and the lines don't move: what's left is the text you had, with holes where the numbers used to be.

The thing to keep in mind is that digits disappear wherever they are, in the middle of a word too. «H2O» becomes «HO», «COVID-19» becomes «COVID-», «VAT at 22%» becomes «VAT at %» and «Windows 11» becomes «Windows». If your text has chemical formulas, acronyms, product models or percentages, take a look before you copy the result.

Numbers written another way stay put

What gets removed are the European digits, the ones we use every day. Numbers spelled out in words («twenty-two»), Roman numerals («XIV») and digits from other scripts (Arabic, Devanagari) are not 0-9, so they stay in the text. That isn't an oversight: removing them would mean guessing which words are numbers, and «hundred» inside «hundredth» isn't one.

Nearby tools

If instead of losing the numbers you need to keep only those, the opposite direction is Extract numbers from text; for phone numbers alone there is Extract phone numbers. To drop punctuation marks there is Remove punctuation, and to take out anything at all, deciding for yourself what, Find and replace.