Remove punctuation

What it's for

It removes from a text everything that isn't a letter, a digit or a space. It's mostly useful before an analysis: counting words, looking for duplicates, preparing a vocabulary list, feeding a text to a program that expects clean words. It's also handy for cleaning a title or a filename of quotes, colons and slashes, which some fields don't accept.

What actually disappears

Rather more than punctuation alone disappears: commas, full stops, quotes, brackets, dashes, but also emoji, currency symbols, the percent sign, the at sign and the hash. What stays is every letter, accented ones and other scripts included, every digit and every space, so the lines don't move and the text keeps its layout.

The apostrophe case

The apostrophe is punctuation, so it goes too: «don't» becomes «dont», and in languages like Italian two words get welded into one that doesn't exist («dell'anno» becomes «dellanno»). If you need the text for counting words, keep that in mind; if you need it readable, this isn't the right page. The same goes for the hyphen in compound words.

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.