Remove punctuation

What it's for

It removes punctuation marks from a text: commas, full stops, semicolons, colons, exclamation and question marks, quotation marks, brackets, hyphens and dashes, ellipses and slashes. It is mostly useful before an analysis: counting words, looking for duplicates, building a word list, feeding a text to a program that expects clean words. It also helps to clean a title or a file name of quotation marks, colons and slashes, which some fields do not accept.

What actually disappears

Punctuation is what the Unicode standard calls punctuation, in any language: the Spanish «¿» and «¡» too, angle quotes and long dashes. Less obvious: the percent sign, the at sign, the hash, the asterisk and the ampersand are punctuation marks for Unicode, and they go as well. Symbols that are not punctuation stay: currencies such as € and $, maths signs such as + and =, the degree sign and emojis, for which there is the «Remove emojis» box. All letters stay, accented ones and those of other alphabets included, all digits and the line breaks, so the lines do not move.

Between two words, a space

Between two words a mark does not just vanish: it becomes a space, otherwise the words would weld together. So «e-mail» becomes «e mail», «3.5» becomes «3 5» and «yes/no» becomes «yes no». The same goes for an apostrophe before a vowel or an h, as in Italian or French: «dell'anno» becomes «dell anno» and «l'hotel» becomes «l hotel», two words that count as two.

Before a consonant, on the other hand, the apostrophe sits inside a single word and is simply removed: «don't» becomes «dont» and «rock'n'roll» becomes «rocknroll». At the edges of a word, like quotation marks or a comma at the end, the mark disappears without leaving anything, and the lines stay where they are.

«Remove extra spaces» is ticked by default as well, because a mark between two spaces would leave two of them in a row: in «Rome - Milan» they would sit between «Rome» and «Milan». If you need the spaces as they were, for instance for indentation, untick that box.

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 accents, Remove numbers, Text on one line and Tabs to spaces.

Nearby tools

If your problem is accents instead, for example because an old program won't take them, the page is Remove accents. To drop only the digits there is Remove numbers and to drop only emoji Remove emoji. If you're preparing a name for a web address, which also wants dashes instead of spaces, the complete job is done by Make a URL slug.